The Gilded Age
       

The sky is all eyelid
and the moon is a whorl of cotton candy
with no one left to eat it but god.
When happiness comes back,
it comes back on stilts,
on acid, on bended knee.
Like a prodigal. Like a madrigal.
Like a boss man, gold chains glinting
in the harsh September sun.
Fate isn't just an ocean.
Some days aren't worth repeating.
I planted you in the fecund earth
then waited a season for you to bloom.
Shut eye. Hard bulb.
Vituperous species of regret.
You want for nothing: I want a window
beyond me, myself, and me.
Downriver is the past.
Downriver is the foghorn
that used to call the ship to port,
and which now announces
an empty womb, insolvency.

Tweet

Copyright © 2020 Virginia Konchan All rights reserved
from Any God Will Do
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission