visiting hours
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The patio is an island which floods in its sleep,
each room elopes with the bird that smashed into a very clean window, and the on-call physician is dying for a hamburger at this unreasonable hour. What exactly do you mean by brain memory? Soon almost every ostrich will have its own passenger. That’s what I mean. She talks about lobsters and methamphetamine. A few of them live in my esophagus, she says. But that’s not always the case. The problem is I’m obsessive and shaped like a pear. I once knew a coffin maker, was hired to clean his office building. At night, long pink tubules descended from the ceiling like snakes exchanging recipes. (I did my job, I did my civic duty.) In the morning, he staggered in with a bowl of oranges, whistling. My head was full of amoeba. But the actual conversation escapes me. Maybe that’s a good principle to live by: if you get stuck, stay where you are, say, pineapple, pineapple, pineapple. |
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Alex Bernstein’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, The New England Review, Bellevue Literary Review, The West 4th Street Review, and elsewhere. A recent graduate of Columbia University’s MFA program, he is an adjunct English professor and director of the writing center at Mildred Elley College.