Friday Love Poems: More Victor Infante!

Alexandria

Unspeakable ghost knowledge tapping at the back of my teeth. I hold flames to my lips, try to burn this from me, but it just rises again as steam, settles as condensation, soaks again into my skin.

I hadn’t meant to tell you a desert, but my throat was sirocco, words simmering in arid dust,

evaporating.  The sandstorm of this flakes at my skin, longs to kiss the earthquake of you, until I am swallowed completely, until I am gone.

Aretha in Static (In-Between Days Suite)

1.

Just past

where the Mass Pike hits

the New York Thruway,

Aretha breaks through

100 bands of static,
a voice to absolve the dead.

Bubblegum pop and dog-tired

classic rock dissolve

in notes, fresh and vital

as when “Chain of Fools”

was new,

insistent as thoughts

of the redhead typing

back home, the voice

that tugged me away

from California,

melted a nation between us:

a song in the static,

suddenly, undeniably

clear.

2.

No name for the tesseract space between us: airport terminal affection, billowing steam in the right hand of Shiva. Communication breakdown. The swallowing of sky.

Radio band crackle: Nothing real. Everything.

3.

My transient sibling dragged me by the ear to “Rocky Horror” and played me my first Ramones album on the way: Freedom in two-chord fury channeled through half-dead speakers.

Her vocabulary makes mine a dime-store novel and she beats me at both sides of the Bible. I learned that trick from her. 

We drift—have done since we were bright young things in thrift-store clothes. Postcards from England. E-mail from the Bay. We wave across airports, pass on freeways.

Poetry gets me the eye roll. For her, I’ll say it straight: We’ve survived abandoned theaters and empty bookshops. Bottles crashed against cliff faces, broken glass slid into the ocean.

I love her for that.

Our distance is cell phone reception and dial-up modems.

4.

There are no diminishing returns.

The heart holds all these, and more.

View from the Sandcastle’s Turret

These silica walls were never meant to be home,

but still I find myself by starlight,

hands deep in earth, tide soaking shredded clothes,

sculpting battlements of sand and eucalyptus bark,

seawater mortar, brine-drenched air drowning

the taste of this from my mouth, and still

I scratch absently at the barriers, particles

wedging beneath fingernails.

Memory: Palm at the small of her skinny back;

Fingers gently tracing the brittle bone of her,

as she curled like a question into my lap,

bit my lip, kissed the blood away,

folded herself into the shadows, gone.

Memory: Reclined on a second-hand couch,

not touching, mouthful of ocean, moonlight

caressing your face, not touching, spark of us

burned at the back of our necks, not

unfathomed whispers in the dark,

distant sea shanties; unjoyous ocean

burbling through flooded foundations,

the collapse of elaborate towers

that were never meant to last.

Victor D. Infante is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Pearl, Chiron Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Spillway, Word Riot and Dark Horizons. He's American, but used to live in England. Now he lives in NewEngland, which is less similar than you'd think.

Friday Love Poems: Victor Infante!

When I say “I Love You” I Mean …

You echo static // girl on the steps, in the crowd.

            the undiscovered frequency // smile an incantation.

Call this love. Call it chain lightning, juggled hand-to-hand //

            and Nothing up my sleeve // and Don’t touch that dial.

And Believe.

What reduces me to end-of-the-radio-band gibberish;

What pulses still, when all my magic tricks, revealed.

An American Love Song

Somewhere, a man who voted for last year’s Pilate

is choking down sobs between sips of good American beer.

Johnny Cash is playing on the jukebox.

I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die

streams between the electric crackle of static.

We find love stories in soot-stained hands,

gaze straggled out from the stars to the mire.

Shiny gems of souls locked in prison vaults,

the twittering madness lashed against steel bars.

Unwanted men falling, falling, this is ballet.

One punch releases demons, one moment’s peace

in the thunderclap of imploding bone.

Some cannot survive love’s passing:

their bodies stitched with it like sutures, hands

always open, voices raised in praise to God

for rough-hewn men whose coarsened labors

keep machine gears grinding.

The cement beneath our feet is always unraveling.

We find grace in the strangest places,

Eyes. Black coffee. Love stories.

Soft hands draw us in from undertow.

Embraces, the promise of storms subsiding.

This is always a love story:

One hand clasped tight in desperation,

the other extended outward, like a gift.

This world is rain that pounds like jackhammers,

heads bowed down against the torrent.

The beer is warming. Soon it will be little more

than carbonation and bitter aftertaste.

Play One More For My Radio Sweetheart

10) I knew about snapped bass strings and the boy in Long Beach, knew you’d stripped yourself of even your name, but I wasn’t alarmed until I’d heard she’d rescued your cats.

9) It’s always been split lips and sheathed knives between us, but you were there when the bitch threw rocks at her windows, when the boogeyman slammed fists against her door at 3 a.m., and for that, I’m grateful.

8) Your wedding photos chill me – I search the crowd shots to find my own face lost amid the smiling friends in ill-fitting tuxedoes, like some specter of me was there to dance with you.

7) You laid the guitar in the closet and it disappeared entirely, but sometimes you can hear familiar chords echoing through the house’s rafters, each song a funeral dirge.

6) The radio bears no songs of you and me and what we’ve lost to the needle; when the world condenses to the back seat of a station wagon, no food for days, the body propelled by small snakes slithering in your veins. No more.

5) No exorcism for ghosts that walk like the living, that telephone desperate and starving from gas station parking lots, begging change for reheated burritos, building a mausoleum of Styrofoam wrappers.

4) The boy’s no good for you, will chip away at you until you are something less, a bauble to be placed on a shelf.

3) She is gone, and her absence rattles like the wind through an empty garage, the whistle of air kissing emptied glass bottles. It haunts you at night when your eyes snap open, disturbed from sleep by a song your fingers still recall how to play.

2) I miss hearing you sing.

1) I should have been there.

BIO: Victor D. Infante is the editor of the online literary journal, Radius, and the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous periodicals, including Pearl, Chiron Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Spillway, Word Riot and Dark Horizons. He's American, but used to live in England. Now he lives in NewEngland, which is less similar than you'd think.