AFTER THE
STORM
Oily
shimmers spread slowly across
the face of
the reservoir like
a toxic
rainbow fallen from the heavens
and on the
sand at the bottom of the pool
a twisted
confusion
wreckage of
metallic carapaces and
alloy-armored
appendages
man-sized
mechanized crustaceans
poached to
a coppery hue and abandoned
to the
fierce affections of oxidation.
Long after
the waters have leached away
their
burnished sheaths and corroded their
gauntleted
clamps, their optical lenses
still
flicker with dream images
of glorious
battles fought between bloodless
pitiless
soulless adversaries
beneath an
endless sea of ink
scored by a
thousand burning satellites.
CONTACT
To them it
was odorless,
colorless,
flavorless, detectable
only
through application
of the most
sensitive instruments
and why
give a name to something
whose very
omnipresence
belies the
fact of its existence?
And as my
gleaming chitinous
integument
begins to melt
before
their luminescent
eyes, they
all twist their shapely
limbs in
sympathy, thinking
perhaps
what a shame it is
that we
should meet
by sad
coincidence just at
the moment
of my spontaneous
but, for my
kind, quite inevitable
dissolution.
DONOR
I saw the boy
with my eyes again
this
morning, and a middle-aged woman,
her faced
marred by my too-large pores,
felt my
heart beating painfully hard
as a jogger
slogged past me in the street,
heard my
stomach growling from inside
a half-open
door. And again, and for
the
thousandth time, I asked myself why
I must be
plagued by this peculiarity,
this wretched
ability to give and give and
give some
more until I can’t even look at
an
attractive woman without feeling
a stab of
incestuous guilt. Ever the
unwilling
benefactor, I try locking myself
in again,
closing my eyes and ears
to the
endless pleading – knowing that in
the end
I’ll give in once more, lay
myself down
and allow them to help
themselves
to my constantly regenerating
bounty.
It’s tissue they’ll be wanting
this time,
I’ve seen the smoke rising on
the
horizon. And they’ll leave me flayed
and
writhing on the table, dreading
the
horrible itch of the new skin to come –
altruist,
angel, philanthropist,
great
sobbing bundle of shattered nerves
and freshly
grown replacement parts.
Bio: Jeffrey Park's poems have appeared in journals
such as Subliminal Interiors, Danse Macabre, Crack
the Spine, and Right Hand Pointing, and his digital
chapbook, Inorganic, is available online from White Knuckle Press.
His poem "Hard To Reach" has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. A
native of Baltimore, Jeffrey now lives in Munich, Germany, where he works
at a private secondary school. Links to all of his published work can be
found at www.scribbles-and-dribbles.
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