L’AURA
i. The Succor Was Not Forthcoming
The world hurt in my oyster.
The blue pooled in organs.
I lived in the century of ripoffs,
of forked cryptocurrencies.
This should explain everything.
ii. Time Whistled Its New Gravity
Trauma retrauma.
I had hungers too.
To sweep for a clean year,
to bow and groan foreign chants.
In sweeping clean the feelings,
sweeping—
I’m always whisked to midnight
by ugly wind.
iii. If One Suffers, Should All Suffer?
Snow had crashed like birds against the frame.
These things occurred—
in the incense of apology,
of loss and regeneration.
iv. In The Roiling Nebula, A Good Cry
To go unhaunted by ‘the pitiless,
spectral syllogisms’ of Manhattan.
That would be something.
v. Et Tu, Brooklyn?
By May I was grasping at legs
like life preservers,
those forms floating
up Bedford.
If art had saved lives
it can’t have been many.
This love (and hurt, too)
would flit through the tenses.
Conflict peeled us down
to our real faces,
the real misconnections.
The clean cold, the clean gulls.
You who sat and were pained
only three miles away.
If whole cities could wheel
as graceful.
Isn’t consummation exhausting?
And that way for birds,
morning worms molting
in stomach acid?
vi. That First Saturday / Imagine What Icarus Hummed
Saturday was Laura visitation
for a four-month stretch.
Kids were to march
and all I could think was
“My bruised heart!”
vii. I Saw Two Frozen Pigeons That Winter
One I kicked off a fire escape,
splashing cadaverine
up my rainboot.
The other lodged in a morning drift,
one week after
Laura’d thought
to save another
that’d hopped
foot to foot
on an iced
Forest Avenue.
In Montauk recovering I saw two deer,
one a red heap on NY-27,
one dancing into a neighbor’s yard,
not counting the spoor by Hog Creek,
not counting the unseen teeming.
In Montauk also
I saw the gulls moving as one.
BIO: Ian A. Bonaparte’s work has appeared in Prelude, The Matador Review, Vinyl, Dream Pop Journal, and elsewhere. He is an Associate Agent at Janklow & Nesbit Associates.
