New York City:
Shh, I know your troubles with Bastille Day,
ten days before my birthday.
We celebrate by burnt wine, meat,
illegal fireworks, high pigment lipstick
taxied ‘round Columbus Circle,
attach artifice, paint avenue,
bludgeon, blow open.
I can’t continue, with you.
I tirelessly fill casts shaped of your promenades,
beaks of West End highway crows, drips, drip,
they dazzle cold.
Blood and steam took conversation,
chose stolen scissors to
gnaw the quick of intention from
our bewilderment. I sculpt ash from dead
lightning bugs armed with machine guns
that pump you plump with
an afterthought of smolder.
Washington Square,
mouth your afterthought.
The dedicated gestation of
going down on a graveyard
are drowned in the fountain
of Lincoln Center, and its scent
of masticated raspberries
fill the bronze tub, an ocean,
an aggregate of washed-up syringe,
the hi-def zoom on an ex-seafoam pixel
and a sun-fucked version of wood.
- Jessica Scicchitano, first published in the “Corresponding Voices” Anthology
Bastille Day