Brendan Lorber
Shame on the Maniacs
Shame on the maniacs within myself who insist I look both ways
before crossing when the real terrors wait for us to come to them
in all their patient expression of doorknobs that taught themselves
how to you know open doors and then how to kill Yet soon
we’d give anything to get back to this day like it was the one we went
to the Williamsburg Bridge and then just walked home and took a bath
without jumping for once “Everybody’s a hero Everybody makes
you cry” makes it okay with delays on the inward ordering of essentials
for their late arrival reminds us these are still the good times themselves
half-convinced that the brutal collapse of the plan was maybe not the plan
all along as it chases us with fear of droplets and then the actual droplets
from our burnt out shell into something like an abandoned mansion on a hill
where they say nobody’s lived for years but is full of agitated whispers
as though a surprise party were seconds away but it’s nobody’s birthday
We Might Hate Every Minute of It
We might hate every minute of it but all minutes
become magic the minute one says they’re magic
Maybe I love New York because it treats us
as enemies with benefits but more likely
because my many almost final scenes happened here
especially that one where I got my arterial empties
refilled with four liters from the five boroughs
Bad odds are the best ones to beat with a good
body of mysteries A body being the thing
that’s interrogated by a timer on one side and sheer
light on the other I like lights when they start
blinking don’t walk and people with scars slightly
more than others for the inkling they might have
of how you half broken go without breaking in half
Nobody’s Going to Roll Up
Nobody’s going to roll up their car or their sleeve
and trick me with this go to the light nonsense
when the light could change before I reach the
other side But here we are aren’t we reaching
for the curb that exists only because we reach for it
like my father’s sculpture on a high shelf since he died
but which just now fell on the machine I’m using
to write this poem It was probably my upstairs neighbor
shaking the ceiling with online aerobics though not
long ago her grandmother’s crystal pitcher did
the same to her as if to say you might not know
the secret but the secret knows you We might hate
every minute of it yet we want our magical nights
to sashay unstoppable through ever-changing light
Brendan Lorber is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. He is the author of If this is paradise why are we still driving? (subpress, 2018) and several chapbooks, most recently Unfixed Elegy and Other Poems. He’s had work in The American Poetry Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fence, McSweeney’s, The Recluse, and elsewhere. Since 1995 he has edited Lungfull! Magazine, currently in hibernation, an annual anthology of contemporary literature that prints the rough draft of contributors’ work in addition to the final version in order to reveal the creative process. He’s also edited The Poetry Project Newsletter, and curated both the Zinc Bar Reading Series and the Segue Foundation Reading Series. His visual art is in The Museum of Modern Art, The Free Black Women’s Library, Opus 40 Gallery, Artists Space, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Woodland Pattern Center, The Scottish Poetry Library, and in private collections. He teaches fantasy cartography through Uncommon Goods. He lives in a little observatory in a Brooklyn neighborhood that nobody can quite find on a map.