Bench Clearing
My dad died
and sports came back.
We wore masks at his funeral
to avoid being next, I guess.
The night before
Joe Kelly fired at Carlos Correa’s head
and cleared the bench
and I get it,
because what other response is there to feeling cheated
than bearing witness to your hate blossoming
from your body,
your spite-filled fingers gripping the splitting seams,
your hurtling release spitting seeds
that will line the graves
of generational grudges.
What song do you serve your ears
the morning after your mom sends you home
with a peace flower
and you say goodbye in the dark
because it hurts to see?
So King Push pummels my skull
as my jaw sits hollow and jagged,
a haggard quarry of heavy stones
and I stare at a cracked tree limb,
angled 90 degrees
in a non-committal breeze.
And a bird cries like a rusty swingset
and now I see the hurt
has just begun to bloom.
Published in Voicemail Poems, Summer, 2025
Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want
You are a tourist
bug-bitten,
sleepless,
back dripping with sweat.
An uninvited percussionist beating centuries of brick road
with a fifty dollar rolling suitcase
and you stumble across a Roa mural
and you order meatballs and Kriek
and every sentence starts with
“sorry.”
And later two Belgian hippies chant
and drag their pale rice paper wrists
across the rims of Tibetan bowls.
Nobody’s speaking
and the candlelight pulls beads of condensation
from your tulip.
The girls sing a Smiths song
as their blonde boy dutifully strums an electric guitar.
Knuckles tighten on your thigh.
You feel warm like you’ve been bathed in red light
and like if you were disposable
this is where you’d want to be cast aside,
rumpled and blown through alleys
bobbing aimlessly in whichever canal,
flicked into the mouth
of a bottle of Polar,
snuffed between two licked fingers,
bussed and rattled into a dumpster out back
with a cathedral view
where two beautiful Belgian girls share a joint
and exhale in perfect harmony.
Published in Major 7th Magazine, January, 2024
I dream again of holding hands in the market
After Lindsay Turner
When the horizon crests with its refrain of desire, my wake-up call is a
stinging handful
of tinging pebbles at the window, a hungover, unsettled metronome of
pecking birds.
And so I have no choice but to stir and slip from you, opened
with tentatively budding joy like
I’m not knocking at the wrong door of an already closed building, late and fevered with speculation,
locked out.
But moments ago your hand was real in mine, evidence of
something hopeful beyond the slanted uneven sunlight that patterns my bedroom floor, the
invigorating graze of cool wind and fanning sparrow flutter beneath the exhausted, aching limbs of my ever-reaching tree.
Published in Literary Cleveland Poetry Workshop Class Zine, 2023
Marissa DeSantis 