Tony Mancus: This Space Eagle Has Landed
A moon alone in the workforce
at home there. The simplest disc in the back
is a breakable plate
and us denting the future
like the tin can it’s imagined to be. One trash ring
for the planet. I don’t know
how to say I am
boring with my thought saddle
and my possession myth—
one emblem foot-holds a nation
before its inevitable plummet—the cliff
a drawn thing—our legs-a’wheeling
beneath the cartoon
graveyard of our minds. Remains are as populous
as ever but we will not be undersold
knowing another chicken is born
every minute into this egg-scratch
death race—for a bird
only knows what it can’t
steal and the oven only knows
how to make it
more than cozy after the bird’s been
cleaned right down to its wingspan,
and the moon knows more
us spread-eagled on our beds aching
with whatever breast-death we did
or didn’t consume
as the ring grows and goes
dark behind us now.
if I put the skull next to the lampshade
and tell you I’m documenting all of the feelings created
or dispelled, will you bury your next body
in the hole nearest mine? when it comes time
to plant the cycling records so they’ll grow more luminous
over the short and straight-lined decades there’s little
mention of each drug dispensary
candy-shaped and neon
glowing along the roadside—where the cap
guns are really terrific this year.
their wanton handlers get noodle-armed at the sight
of a silhouette to make loud noises in front of
with the hope that what isn’t real and what
can be believed
converge and run away together: matchstick
in a broom closet, fit of angels
on the pinhead choked
off and pointing. the feedback loops
through a pedal until all this noise becomes
one uniformed voice
disguised as a vibrating string—a fist
among flowers
bobbing its fingered head off
TONY MANCUS is the author of a handful of chapbooks—most recently City Country (winner of the Seattle Review chapbook contest) and apologies (forthcoming from Reality Beach). He co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning in 2008. He currently co-curates the In Your Ear reading series with Meg Ronan in Washington D.C. and is a chapbook editor for Barrelhouse. He lives with his wife Shannon and three yappy cats in Arlington, Virginia. More from this
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