Cooking for someone can be loaded with danger.
He’ll get here at six and I’m filled with a small fear
of conversation at the table.
I always toy with the edge across my throat,
between the cabbage, the duck and coffee we stare into.

There are many ways to scream.
I’ve chosen the silent one
because I”m afraid of being discovered as I am, not
who he remembers 20 years ago.

I want to say thing have changed since then.
I’ve smoked my lungs black and eaten my heart out.
Lost each leaf of hair and seen friends to their graves.

So the real talk is never said.
After a polite time he leaves a bit early.
I want to re-run dinner again
with simpler food, the apartment a little messy.
I’d like to walk right over the edge and say,
‘Who we were then is fable.’
But that takes believing we’re someone right now.

Instead I sit down to a second meal.
I’m famished from things left unsaid,
go to bed too early, and wake totally
at the national anthem, before the TV hisses
into blue snow.

I get up. I eat again.

Reports from the Palace
by Ian McBryde

The abandoned hospital
was a godsend. We are
exhausted, and short on hope.

-

Dusty coverlets on carefully
made beds stretching
down the many wards.

-

Those of us with
training in medicine
have been taken aside
and whispered to.

-

October. No word from you.
The old cities glowing
sickly, remotely, to the east.

-

Armed guards
around the morphine.

-

Seasons slowing down.
Two of the scouts
have still not returned.

-

As yet there have
been no relays from
the south tower.

-

In the emergency bay
someone has erected
a sculpture fashioned
from used syringes.

-

The ravaged, upper sections
sealed off. No one allowed
above the third level.

-

Nightly, a rage of flame
on the horizon. The smell
of temples on fire.

-

Linen missing. Frost
on a heap of wheelchairs
stacked in the back field.

-

Another scout gone.
The meeting reset
for tomorrow.

-

Just before dawn.
All my transmissions
to you coming back
to me, unanswered.

-

Someone has been
on the roof again.
Footprints. Palmprints.
Evidence of signaling.

I could not feel her longing. She said “love” as though it were an easy thing, cotton candy melting sweet on the tongue. I did not know of love. What I knew was harshness— my waves crashing mercilessly at the shores of places I did not care to know the names of.

She did not know my depths, the crushing silence of abyssal plains scattered with the vestiges of so much wasted life. In my darker moments, I have kept my secrets close to me, the way a mother holds a child. Close to my breast, I hold hellish creatures, feeding from fire and brimstone and darkness. Light only goes so far. In its absence, we find other things to sustain us.

What I have to offer has always been conditional, the current just so, the seamount just emerged, the chemical compositions just right. Life flourishes here, but only for the ordinary instant. There is no room for love, that unconditional hope brandished by poets and dreamers, in a place where everything depends on the ordinary instant.