Weston Cutter
Cat’s Cradle
light through tree
like discrepancies
of yearning .   go   ahead + believe
every thought ends
with a period + each breath’s
a semi-colon
no one knows how
to use correctly in the sentence that is
the storm bearing through what’s left
of the ash now that borers
have chewed its heart
like regret . branches shake
+shiver,flex +quiver
like shadows cast from wall-
mounted candles in every church
I ever slammed a door heading in to
or leaving whispering givenwords
but praying only save me save
me save me : praying only for proof
that this jubilant mistake-making I breathe
so anxious was something‘s in tent . tell me
how to believe I’m worth what ever’s
been sacrificed . the storm sounds like a cat
thrown from a moving car
in a flaming pillowcase + Lord
if this is your image — scared man
in basement beneath bowing world, seething
from-above catastrophe — we’re both
more hideous than I feared.
Close Enough
The future will be all foam soap
and touchscreens, poof, facsimiles
of all we for now breathe +ex
perience : someday I’ll point
at some picture, say Here’s
when I went to Rome by going, here’s
the time I tried on a toga, poof:
each its own form of truth.
In order of uselessness: wreaths
of Ceasarian laurel leaves, how
any river flows through history,
toga parties. Who has yet to dress
with any hope
other than to later
disrobe perhaps while getting drunk
enly or otherwise groped, perhaps
groping back, vino’ed up + spilling
some hard-earned grape-induced
truths. Hail poof, et tu poof, I came
not to bury poof but to praise: e-
ventually I awoke in the slatelight
of dawn in some city, any city, + from
the window caught scent of what
ever river flowed through, river
named after some ancient term
for this hill seems
as good as any
in a language no one spoke and
therefore believed so beautiful
Weston Cutter‘s from Minnesota and is the author of All Black Everything and You’d Be a Stranger, Too.
