Lindsay Savage

untitled
 
logic musters, disquiet—
the trees are blooming in the rain
towards the northern cold
and inside the overstuffed room
he's speaking, eastern accent intoned
over humming fans faded
to circadian rhythms of
thoughtless time, saying
"this, all, horrid that it is in weather,
comes to existence—this being
sputtered to a supercilious end" and the graphite
indent becomes the graying sky—

he dreams of Ceausescu, vampires
perched in gabled films- corners built
to all order—this, this—

in the streets of darkened cities a million executed
geniuses stand railing at the april cold, cursing violets
that grow wild beyond the hedgerows, covering the
silent dead—

"horrid excuse!" they chant to famed pockmarked streets, ruined
figureheads dormant in grand tombs, and then they are
lulled by sylvan calmness—

"we are always changing," he says. the
students sleep in heated rooms, growing unto
the sharpened night, the stygian modernity
unhinged, flowers curtly placed at crossroads,
if for nothing than survival
 

 
Qatar

the father was
crossing Qatar—

he lit a cigarette and burned a regime-changing
month-old
milk carton. it would burn in the desert
it would burn
better than the hard bread,
the grease for the barrels—

and besides
milk went bad after
so much time.

and the father stood
at Qatar “you—

country. we are alone you and I country,
I analyst smoking—

can we be treaty? would noun of

eastern sun
be noun of curved nose—

the hook of arm?”

only in the smaller sultanates could this father be standing—
heavy lid-eyed to the pugnacious monarchs
and he had green insects little green insects. he (this father)

“they
are Biblical. at

that, we should recognize”

the country
suddenly was water beneath
this father’s trod—
a sea—
 

drought

the red air makes men crazy-
they say that is
why nobody lives near
the canyon-

and in the red air
they make the statues
that fall to red,
before the winter starts—

and in the
far hills some men
say there is a place
where it rains and rains,
and it looks
like the sea, when it rains—

the women have never seen
the white sand, white water, skies
white over water—

the women watch the men
in the red air—

their eyes become stone,
and the stone turns to red,
before the winter
comes



Melville On The Dock

it was gleaming bullion,

in the sequestered ships,
they opened their bird—
like eyes and pronounced in pouncing
gestures—

the clinking smack of flag,
and litigious cargo—
a gold of conversations the older rhymes blinking
back the nova of
superceding the chain crosses—

“a good sailor, men,”

at the new england port, standing abreast the puritanical calming
of the novena sea

“a good sailor does not pray,

because well it known our most
loving Lord does not hear the noble burst
of foreign matter

amidst the constancy of His
noble ocean”

a company—

stands and drinks. a young
man in a beard scribbles
a description.

keeps it some—
place


 
Lindsay Savage lives in West Long Branch, New Jersey, and attends Monmouth University. Plum Ruby Review is her first publication.