Is a bay on the mountain possible?
I want Bayamón to be the place

that makes it so, for what its syllables
do to my brain while they tussle

and grunt in that small blue place.
It seems the only thing

differentiating butterflies from moths
is that butterflies aren’t moths.

Isn’t it true with rage too?
That rage isn’t desire

because it has a pinch less of glow?
I think I may have a problem with that,

with the Taíno Indians of Puerto Rico
tricking me into a dream:

Bayamón comes from Bayamongo,
the river that bisects the city.

At least there is something salvageable
left to the land of the pork rind:

a place where you might fall in love
with the person falling to pieces

in the automobile next to you—
traffic more famous than the rum—fantasy,

where all objects are named by what
courses through them, where one thing

is—at least for a moment—
one thing, where Man remains

a secret, fixed. Or if he emerges, Man
be called blood, controlled in that way,

named again. And the eucalyptus, alone
on the mountainside, be called flame.

Britt Melewski

Britt Melewski grew up in New Jersey and Puerto Rico. His poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, The Philadelphia Review of Books, Sporkpress, the DMQ Review, and are forthcoming in The Avatar Review. Melewski received his MFA at Rutgers-Newark in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn.

Artwork: Brooke Shaden, “wildfire”
Website: http://brookeshaden.com/gallery/

21 Dec This entry was published on December 21, 2013 at 12:06 am and is filed under 4 (December 2013), Archive, Poetry. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.