Life Is Sweet
For the next few
years we might
need to live in
some kind of
aquarium, something
semi-transparent &
lit by those blue
lights, maybe
some of those
unnatural pink
rocks along
the bottom . . . but
I can’t see us
contained in an
aquarium unless
it were, you know,
the size of an
ocean. Still
I worry sometimes
how everything can be
contained
turned into a poem
or a movie,
something that can be
walked out on . . .
even Life
Is Sweet, by the end
we fell in love
with everyone, by
the end the straight
sister tells
the suffering sister,
I hear you, you know,
at night
& we knew how much
it meant, just to be
heard—
& then it was over,
an uneaten cookie on
the couch
between us. I don’t know
what else we thought
might be there
maybe just that we’d be
alive & still,
you know, moving around
inside this world.
If I Speak for the Dead I Must Leave
You opened my mouth
& filled it
with stones, for days
then weeks then
years, we swam until we
couldn’t, like
horses, our bodies,
little noises—
now this now this—
until it didn’t make any
sense . . . . Did we really
believe that
if we could just return to
the source & fully
we might then be able
to sink back into it? I
woke up in a boat once I
couldn’t
remember, I opened my mouth
& then, little snake, you
were gone. I didn’t know
you might not
come back. Once I
could say I’d never kissed
anyone
who is now dead, once
that was true, as if
my lips were a cure, as if death
wasn’t the only reason we
got into that boat. It
held us for as long as
it did, that’s all we can say,
until it didn’t.
Nick Flynn, poet and playwright, is also the author of the best-selling memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. A member of the creative-writing faculty at the University of Houston, his work has won two PEN prizes, a Guggenheim fellowship, and been a finalist for France’s Prix Femina. I Will Destroy You, his next collection of poems, will be released later this year. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
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