Bryan Roessel Poetry

for anna (forever ago)

on a wednesday night,
two days after the new moon,
the sky bare of clouds,

i almost called you –
i even dialed your number –
but that longing’s gone.

i looked at the stars
and realized i don’t want
to share them with you.

olvido

and it comes to pass
that you look in the mirror
and see only a collapsing building

that the earth is swallowing you
up, silent

and there will be no echo,
no overgrown ruin in the forest,
just still hungry soil

and the stream that you still love
used to whisper salaam, salaam,
over and over,
but she won’t make eye contact anymore

y sucede que me canso de ser hombre

y puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche

and finally your pen has run out of ink
and you scratch harder, gouge deeper,
but you can’t form words anymore

gender studies part i

male blanket octopus:
size of a thumbnail, you peel off
your wriggling sperm-filled
hectocotylus, cut your own arm
as a gift of love to a female
the size of kobe bryant
i imagine you van-gogh,
whispering “keep this object
like a treasure” as your unbloody
sex arm curls up in the safety of her
mantle, as you slink away to quiet
obscurity, as you find somewhere
dark and alone to finally die, giving
up your body as food, giving everything,
and i envy you your unobtrusiveness, wish
i could be free of ego and gregariousness, and
i envy your pure dedication to purpose, wish
i knew so firmly my life’s end, wish
i knew anything

private thoughts at 6 am while listening to bon iver’s “for emma forever ago”

enough time
turns lost love
into a cicada shell

a hollow melange of
lust and nostalgia
left abandoned under a tree

the ley lines and star alignments that drew us together
have all lock-tumbler shifted
and the combination is in a notebook
in a cobwebbed and dusty box
that i left on the curb for recycling
on some unspecified thursday in 2012
or 11, or 13
something a little unlucky

i miss you
in the same way that i miss
a dream, upon waking:
a sandcastle, built under the wrong moon, described to a stranger
shapes so thick with water that they can’t hold,
but it was good, wasn’t it?
it was probably good.
it must have been good.
i think i remember smiling.