“Equal Footing” and Other Works by S. O. Young Jr

Steven O. Young Jr. is knitted into the Great Lakes’ mitten, where he occasionally slathers soundstages with his body weight of paint. His latest works are available or forthcoming within Great Lakes Review, Potomac Review, Flint Hills Review, and L=Y=R=A.

Equal Footing

Blood tongues pavement
crenulations, the gap spacing
slabs an aqueduct failed
in the disastrous fantastical
miracle of level ground,
equal footing a mirage
orthopedically ingenious
or the weathered product
our eyes decline to
: see in the closest dying
star wefts unthread by theory
strung through ash
-gasped gills flirting with|out
-board hypnotic m/is/er\c\y.

Let’s give it a spin—squirrels
stripped gypsum skin
from quarls, obsoletion
an option to pontificate
in the Methuselistic infinite
Medusa’s gaze affords.
Turn again—quarrels
ripped gypsies’ kin
from cordial absolution,
anopsia’s induplicate
anthem enthused wholistic infant
meadows aggrade with zaffre.

Swim in the pigment
pasture passing as sea
salt slipping your grip.
Unclench my coprolitic
annulled fist, or is it
incorporated amethyst?
Appraisal is impossible
since we’ve lost
count of doomsdays.

But that’s too close
to a point. Fight back
undercurrent churning
all around us, ossify
this bobbing observation
of our cobalt bodies
(s)melting atop each other
‘s palm frond foundation
into plum[b] puddles
hissing arsenic
before we follow
down the flow and light
this dream on fire.

Into Dusk

Night claws
out from the horizon,

elm fingers darkening
without touch.

The sun wants
to shatter

us
indiscriminately,

strip our eyes
of dimension and identity.

A bird or bat
or curious climber

knocks on a branch
overhead, plaintive

thumps echoing
through an empty home

or ignored after resident grub
reluctantly test the peephole

and see nothing, or
larvae lay back and surrender

whatever vestiges remain
of yesterday’s existence,

folding under another
layer of bark budding

into dusk, hunger
a constant

obliviousness
can’t erase.

The branch sings again
and I find myself

burrowing
in the shadow’s trunk,

a nest of wings
and leaves and leavened

skin—probably;
twilight-blessed with forgetting

whatever separation
lines ourselves and sky,

the prison of the visible
an afterthought

orbiting
behind closed lids.

my latest list of (ir)rational fears

(my tongue thickening,)
the not-so-secret sacrilege
of a pothole misread;

(ibuprofen overdoses,)
hurricanes peel
my insulated heart
from its great lakes ribcage;

(impossible knots,)
inexorable desires heave
every door against freeway wind
shear feeling for the dotted line
fixed in the pit of my stomach;

(pixelated putrefaction,)
fugitive motes frame
flit reflections under the tide
-swept edge of glass
smiles seized at their zenith
in a broken impulse of orbit;

amygdala mal(nourishment.)

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