in parentheses

Steve Gerson writes poetry and flash about life’s dissonance. He has published in CafeLit, Panoplyzine, Crack the Spine, Decadent Review, Vermilion, In Parentheses, Wingless Dreamer, Big Bend Literary Magazine, Coffin Bell, and more, plus his chapbooks Once Planed Straight; Viral; And the Land Dreams Darkly; and The 13th Floor: Step into Anxiety from Spartan Press.

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Self Portrait in Ice

The rain snows like frozen pigeons
falling from a gray sky.
Ice sleets the streets in disgust.
I’m slipping on miscommunicated trust.

Why is not the question.
The answer is on my cold skin that shatters
as ice crystals, erupting in fractals that slice.
My conscience is in glacial upheaval.

See the blackening roses latticed with spider webs.
See the ice that coagulates in my veins
and drips slowly from the slash in my side.
See my frozen terror cracking like a winter pond.

I’m as rabbited feet scuttling from red foxes
to leave white prints in the black snow,
glyphics reading like a child’s scrawled letters,
screaming.

I’m as a bloodied blue jay skittering across the snow,
scribing dissonant diatribes feathered by broken wings.
My breath steams on a cold windowpane as rivulets
of blood streaming in tears from a swan stranded in a frozen lake.

My eyes stare from under the iced eaves
of a farmhouse shrouded in white mists,
my brow the abandoned nest of shrieking starlings,
my tongue the mangled shards of winter wheat moldering.

And I shiver, ice plunged, ice encased like peacocks plummeting,
their plumes shredded in angst. And I cry with the creaks
of wooden skiffs trapped in ice floes, drifting, the wood
wailing as limbs torn in a winter storm, wind shearing.

A·ban·don (əˈbandən)

Noun: My room was dark in abandonment

Adjective: An abandoned Christmas tree,
hospice-delivered but forgotten,
leaned against a corner void
to my right. No tensile streamers.
No string of colorful lights.
Dry needles littered the floor,
thirsting.

Verb, past tense: Ambient light
like a lost guest seeped in through
the window to my left. A dim glow
had abandoned the wintery gloom,
sun setting behind disturbed
clouds reflecting gray snow.

Noun: I could hear but not see cars
speeding with abandon, their whoosh
the sound of my intubation wheezing,
heading rapidly toward a hazy destination.
Minutes before, my caregiver had read
the chart hanging from my bed like an
amputated foot. “How are you?” he asked,
but his phone interrupted.

Verb, present participle: He held up one finger
in pause, said, “Got to get this. Be back soon,”
before he left the room abandoning me to silence.

Adjective: From my window, I saw a skeletal
cell tower, out of service, no reception. An
abandoned grocery cart, wheel-deep in snow,
sat empty in the cold field, wind whistling through
it as a marrowless bone flute to awaken specters.

Noun: I was dark in abandonment.

The Mountain Metastasizing

1.
The light in the east rained fire and fear,
that annus horribilis, pelting us in a deluge
of disease. We trudged as under a dragon’s
wings, its teeth bared, eyes yellow,
along a road winding toward
a mountain’s dark shadow.

2.
A dark mountain spewed fear
like bats and ravens
erupting from caverns, each day
a stalactite dagger in our chests,
x-rays webbing spider tracks,
neuron snakes, synapses frayed
as if chewed by orcs in steel traps.

3.
Not even orcs in steel traps,
they fearfully shrieking
as infusion weeping,
could deter you, you cloaked
in courage red as the dream
of blooms in spring. Like an umbrella
opening, you shunned our doom,

4.
we doomed to flow in eddies,
sludge muddied, our turbidity
of terror. You called after us
as shepherd to sheep, saying,
“The dark mountain
is not encased in fire. The light
that rains in the east is dawn.”

To read you

You’re as ink blots,
to me,
ellipses of thought,

a sentence to be written,
pen poised,
in expectation.

I try to read you,
to follow the rhyme
of your rhythm,

to unlock the enigmas
of your scansion,
wanting to be of you

as pen to paper,
as punctuation
to syntax,

to feel the pulse
of your words,
the mind of your moods,

to read the ridges
of your ribcage
like braille,

to touch the folds
of your spine,
from cervical to sacral,

like the teeth
of a key
to your mysteries.

Venom

He was coiled.
Others saw passivity,
mistakenly, but behind
his hooded eyes peered
deception. Within his barred
mouth, fangs dripped beads of
venom tearing at my trust.
When he said, “I’m sorry, babe.
She didn’t mean anything to me.
It’ll never happen again,” I felt
the hiss of his tongue flicking
the air for the scent of his next
infidelity.

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