PLACED WITHOUT LEGITIMATE CAUSE

We tossed sheets over our heads to be seen. Ghosts.
The only vacancy we knew. We were columns
of calcium deposits rising from a floor of unknowing.
Stalagmites. Growing toward our mirrored ceiling
counterpart—easy to think ourselves them. Stalactites.
Every moist hole keeps what is nameless.
Caves. Hold the history of water. Know the way
hollow openings lead to a surface, the way a girl’s
knees know clutching tree bark will keep
her from falling. Go ahead, say what you are:
Tomboy. Skipping stone. Christmas letter. Circle we draw
around ourselves. Gay says nothing of chopsticks.
We crack open fortune cookies, pluck a white
paper promise: Fear plus coincidence equals paranoia.

 

 

 

 

 

SUNDAY’S CONVERSATION WITH MY FRIEND TOM

As certain as he feels the grain of his unfinished hardwoods beneath his feet,
he knows death
brings burial, burial
brings decomposition.

I tell him I recently heard the Rimpoche say, Anesthesia is not freedom.

He tells me he quit his Buddhist group
because, They believe
in reincarnation.

It’s something he cannot swallow,
somewhere he cannot hide,
someplace he will not go.

He says he cannot, accept chanting.
Some people have magical thinking, they believe if they do it,
something will change.

I say,
It could.

He says,
Anesthesia is not freedom.

So why do you think marijuana should be legalized? I ask.
After all, if you call faith in everlasting life a lie to subdue death anxiety,
why should pot be allowed to subdue life anxiety?

He says,
Anesthesia is not freedom.
But it helps.

 

 

 

 

 

MORNING STRANGERS

My dog’s so distracted by hunting out cat paws in the snow he can’t
poop. His nose leads, I lean my shoulders and back, back. We make
our way like this. The street lamps’ dull light stripes our way past
the dark bank building with one office light on which means she’s
there. The lone woman, whose profile I’ve come to know, her face
pressed into her computer screen, the same way I lean forward
toward the windshield driving on a snowy night. Or how I force my
camera out the car window to capture swaying dune grasses in
summer. The vastness of all those hills and sand. I wonder what it is
that the bank lady is trying to get so close to. Or the guy who hustles
down the middle of the road in the dark, his body slant into a grocery
cart full of plastic bags piled higher than his head. Rolling metal
wheels and all those tin cans clanking. He is rattling too. Which
makes me think of ecstatic chanting or a bonfire or trying to swallow
the tequila worm.

BIO: Cindy Ostuni is a Clinical Social Worker and writer living in Syracuse, NY.  She is a current student of the Syracuse Downtown Writer’s Center Pro Program for poetry. Her work has been published in The Stone Canoe,  the Reader’s Write section of The Sun Magazine, and is forthcoming in The Pinch Journal.