CO-PILOT
drafting board contours of your concave guts and
empennage frowns, wings gull or otherwise,
charcoal to stencil became metal.
you’d wing it, with wide swathed shoulder pivots to construct
machinery beyond your reach—vertical limits of dreams
at either a sextant’s extent, or cobwebbed vertices of apartment walls.
always then the draftsman,
never the illustration.
but in memory you’re sketched—lines
stretching towards vanishing points shaky,
vibrating to warping until heat melts my
every aluminum recollection of you: hunched
overly midnight serious, me at your side
weighing you down from taking flight.
THE TWO THUMBS UP
There’s a couch burning past-midnight before accumulated faces beneath tonight’s jawing
crescent moon. Lit up by the flames, the noses huffing plastics grin whippets ecstatic at how
quickly the fire’s arrived, how quickly it’ll abscond. If only we could lick the flames in turn
when—come daybreak—we’re reduced back to chalky shadows.
Marco Visciolaccio is an author in Asheville, North Carolina. He edits French Broads Lit, a publication celebrating authors in Southern Appalachia. His work can be found in Johnny America, Trampoline Poetry, Strip Mall Magazine, and elsewhere. Find him sending opinionated emails, unsolicited. Site: visciolaccio.com
