Image by Roxana Kenjeeva

Poetry Shed Light

Michael D. Snediker

Argo ergo an ego in
the rye & once only once he laughs at
the sun. Paired into

alibis, asking a lot then (steadily)
a little less. Stripped down to

my funny little hip & a watercolor
fuss waving it away. His lower tone, before
being asked

to cope wherever the kite gone
missing sailed
into the suffering branch.

A furnace of settled hours. & the
vision of a sudden of a child drenched.

Peered stringently from
its bruise of glass.

Crow mutiny spreading a stain, an unslept
sheet of sky & anger all the time.

But they called me by
another name.

Automatic plot & opal
choral ordinary, somewhere there.

We value
what you have done under the bowl, where
you have flickered,
so long.

Michael D. Snediker is the author of three books of poetry — The Apartment of Tragic Appliances, The New York Editions, and Jones Very (forthcoming) — as well as Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions and Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment. He is a professor of American literature and poetics at the University of Houston.