Envelope Elegy
Caleb Nelson Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, the hotels and casinos of this world never close. Someone is serving a platter of carnitas to customers who cannot remember what they ordered. Someone in snakeskin boots throws dice at red felt. Look over your shoulder. Nothing is happening. Who knows, maybe you finally forget about the past and all that horrifying nonsense, but look at it this way, even the bones in the desert lay choked with mossy lace. Even the inkblack mountains spit fire at your perfect teeth. Driving Texas Balmy night and the sweat that never left you. Water’s edge and the sad coyotes sing. God how the prophets died, shattered in their beds. Some secrets can’t be given away. My taste of you is arrow, bent wood in a sweet notch. Whenever I let go, you dig another well. You laugh at cathedrals of dust. We never talk about the stars, thank god. I’m glad you eat dinner over the sink, I’m glad you wear chaps like a prince wearing sneakers. But listen to me now, whatever plans you cut, whatever shit you stammer, amnesia has the final say. You ache in the winter’s heat. Where they whip you like a dog. No one is around. The cattle cart just trots on by. Wheels and bells and whistles. The weirdest jingle in the world. Parking Lots in Paradise For a moment, I press really hard on the reality of physics and sorrow and the corn-on-the-cob we buy for two dollars. This must be what’s happening to my head, this must be what happened to my father. I feel like jam in a bottle like soup in bread. Hear me out, even if love suspends the grammatical notes in my parenthetical spine, I have to keep going. I have to drive my beat to shit Ford to the saddest bar in California. What if heaven is busted like the sun you can’t quite kick in. I’m tired of mystery. Tired of the theories of mystery. One day you tell me that cranial bone makes devil stone and what’s robbed of music can never be said again. |
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About the Author:
Caleb Nelson is a poet living in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He is a Master of Fine Arts Poetry Candidate at Northern Michigan University, and Associate Poetry Editor of Passages North. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Stoneboat, Prick of the Spindle, Red Savina Review, Storm Cellar, Josephine Quarterly, and Cardinal Sins.
Caleb Nelson is a poet living in the upper peninsula of Michigan. He is a Master of Fine Arts Poetry Candidate at Northern Michigan University, and Associate Poetry Editor of Passages North. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Literary Magazine, Stoneboat, Prick of the Spindle, Red Savina Review, Storm Cellar, Josephine Quarterly, and Cardinal Sins.