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A BOY TURNS THE KEY HIS OWN BREATH BURSTS
no longer safely squeezed and sealed in
a lockbox the boy his red aegis
shuddering maledictions pistons
pumping my lungs open my lungs his
ragged wings the boy my own viral
mirror eating outward from my spine’s
fluid base he’s rectifying me
into a vessel some empty space
to fill me in wings of textured air
and he has fine poisons he’s whipping
my innards unwinding his wet tail
my own face but finer unlined boy
of deep song when he wails and wanders
in red mist and sound which slakes the hunt
against its own becoming now free
flailing in human impossible
structures you are full of definite
furies battening yourself down I’m
thinner than the thin fears your ship your
prison is my mind bright boy you bite
the middling delivery man I
am your trembling bark you’re fit to fall
on me small and hungry as the sea
Dan Rosenberg is the author of cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press) and The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press), which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also written two chapbooks, A Thread of Hands (Tilt Press) and Thigh’s Hollow (Omnidawn), which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest, and he co-translated Miklavž Komelj’s Hippodrome (Zephyr Press). Rosenberg’s poems have appeared recently in Ploughshares, Colorado Review, North American Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. He teaches literature and creative writing at Wells College in Aurora, NY.