My Heart an Ice Rink on the Moon
(a monosyllabic poem)
The moon-blue glue-gun of my heart glows
so hard I can know how plants, kept in a box
and grown in the dark, move in. Light is not
all they lack, for they are made of it, no one
else to be. When my eyes taste you my head
fills with sweat, and not the kind you think.
The swish and scrape of my steel blades
sound on the ice and I let go, glide off, blood
cells as they count strokes, my heart’s drift
like a bell clapped for each of the trumped-up
suns you’ve touched, hiss of stars no one
can hear. The lens cap of my face is a valve
you said kept most of it out just so I could
think. A man once lived here, I say. But when
in the first push of spring they cut down
that big tree in the back yard, we took the boat
carved from a log washed up on the beach
the night the moon died, and left. In our blade
of bones the moon hones our skates so sharp
they cut ice, spin us like knives so we won’t think
that way. Heart of hearts, rink a shaved think
tank and yes, the round bus shifts gears, grinds
bones to dust, climbs the steep ridge of our heads
in dreads. Stiff eyes crack as they laugh, shards
in a dome too tight for birth. The moon’s edge
as it cuts through the clouds, plumped and chalked
by the sun’s roar, one skate still not laced.
Bobby Parrott is radioactive, but for how long? This queer poet’s epiphany concerns the intentions of trees, and now his poems enliven dreamy portals such as Tilted House, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Rabid Oak, Diphthong, Neologism and elsewhere. He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his top house plant Zebrina and his hyper-quantum robotic assistant Nordstrom.