AREOLA

A knot’s shadow
forms a cartouche.
As sun eggshells the sun.
See the red roots everywhere
your eyes are full of?
It’s easy
to spot a tsunami. The seabed
mud silvers, I hear someone
call a twin name.
Seismograph, polygraph: hairs
thinner than a toy axle,
wean the bootlicker
off boot polish.
Without cresting a hill.

Cresting the hill,
your hands first were sails,
fingers minarets next.
Hell was a domino
run of fives nulled by the flash
of a wall rising.
A crust of clay
washed off the rims of my ears
the further I sank. Voices after me
oval’d, the sun
areola’d into cyan. And the sun
remembered the mosquito
ambered by a drip. See the moon
caught in the plume of sky
in the window? Stand there,
feel up cleanness
in the gap between two.

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from Floor 22 of Apartment Poetry

Read more here

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Brian Orozco is a poet and artist who works in the still and moving image. He holds an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art and an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Paper Bag, Bennington Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and is participating in the Scholar's Program at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.