gary lundy (Western Voices 2022)

Bio: gary lundy's most recent book, each room echoes absence was published by Foothills Publishing (Spring 2018). His poems have appeared in a variety of magazines and journals including The BeZine, Vallum, Field, Ethel, Oxidant | Engine BoxSet Series 4, and Anti-Heroin Chic. gary is a retired English professor and queer living in Missoula, Montana.

 

grounded within the ellipsis separating

the boiling over point of apprehension

and that clear even if hidden meaning

well behaved they play adult tabloid

news and toy cap guns we rarely

depart the enclosure that protests even

while providing protection you doll

yourself up and we suddenly realize that

element of invisibility relied upon to get

through each day that imbalance implicit

in checking off one by one the getting

done necessitates we wonder if anyone

comports us late at night into their

dreamtime fear to enter the nightmare of

mystical pleasure that long gone sliver

of a promise a future bent to willful

flirtation impulse that cardinal impropriety

blindness to trade places with you even

if only imaginatively not unlike the

corporate fixation on profit will not

happen arrival rescheduled dilapidated 

***

 

while our unwashed body and hair

prods probes never brushed for

whatever reason you gain comfort from

the body odor forgive in the absence of

others lie sitting awake pushing that

constant sense of foreboding toward

the locked door practice monologues in

areas of free dialogic voices of all types

in a foreplay of genital freedom you

coast through the predictable and easy

to fathom popular book of a kind of

writing designed to sedate simply by

reinscribing the common unexamined

base of knowledge envy what could

never possibly have been forewarns the

shared discomfort even while

participating in its erasure of ourself we

would of course go there if there was

ever recognized as such the

predicament of failing eyesight a sudden

thought immersed in lavender

***

---

Setu, April 2022