Nick Flynn

Amber

Hover The imagined center, our tongues Grew long to please it, licking The walls, a chamber built of scent, A moment followed by a lesser moment & a hunger to return. It couldn’t last.

Alan Dugan Telling Me I Have A Problem With Time

He reads my latest attempt at a poem And is silent for a long time, until it feels Like that night we waited for Apollo, My mother wandering in and out of her bedroom,

Emptying Town

I want to erase your footprints From my walls. Each pillow Is thick with your reasons. Omens Fill the sidewalk below my window: a woman In a party hat, clinging To a tin-foil balloon.

Bag Of Mice

I dreamt your suicide note Was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag, & in the bag were six baby mice. The bag Opened into darkness, Smoldering From the top down. The mice, Huddled

You Asked How (formerly Even Now She Is Turning, Saying Everything I Always Wanted Her to Say)

At the end there were straws In her glove compartment, I’d split them open To taste the familiar bitter residue, near the end I ate all her Percodans, hungry to know How far they

Children under, say, ten, shouldn’t know That the universe is ever-expanding, Inexorably pushing into the vacuum, galaxies Swallowed by galaxies, whole Solar systems collapsing, all of it Acted out in silence. At ten we

Statuary

Bees may be trusted, always, to discover the best, nay, the only Human, solution. Let me cite an instance; an event, that, Though occurring in nature, is still in itself wholly abnormal. I refer

Embrace Noir

I go back to the scene where the two men embrace & grapple a handgun at stomach level between them. They jerk around the apartment like that Holding on to each other, their cheeks

Twenty-Pound Stone

It nests in the hollow of my pelvis, I carry it with both hands, as if offering my stomach, as if it were pulling me forward. At night the sun leaks from it, it