red booth

Rain surrounds the house and storm winds
tangle lines outside the windows, sycamores
bowing in prayer.  The power
sizzles out.  I reach for candles

but linger in the dark.  Finally,
I open the door -- the porch,
recessed against the downpour,
holds enough late light to live by

for a little while.
The shrinking world's inside this frame,
I squat like Jonah coming out
of the whale's belly.  I half-

lotus my legs, making tiny bonfires
with my cigarettes,
reading about the death of Marilyn,
the dissatisfactions of autopsy,

the question of her empty stomach.
Who can put a world back together
when even beauty doesn't help?
A young mother shepherds her child

across the road, they squeal inside a cage
of stabbing water.  I suddenly know
strangers!  They are real to me,
they make sounds. . .  They flicker

on a screen I call the world, friends
out of town or incommunicado,
lovers a few times and never again,
and across the page, an old ghost

of murder as the twilight turns jade
and viscous. . .  About annihilations,
the locusts returning to the treetops
have much to say.

- Justin Vicari