Aphorism #2
For what it’s worth . . . – Beauty
is a muse with missing laughter.
At times, lightlessly,
appears her borrowed art:
beyond a fence,
there’s the reserve
without detail
from a covered porch.
Between the voids of morning dark,
remains an unsaying
I seek without
the echoed dripping
of old snow off eaves,
as if this winter residue
(that is unveiling
in the way
some silences
can be)
was remainder
to the mourning
after my mother
explained to me
her cancer had come back.
And her irreducible will
then, inverts now,
all the illusions
I live on,
the doomed things I don’t say,
the false immortalities—
and Death—which is a dawning,
rain-riddled
darkness I’m trying
to manage
and push away,
for what it’s worth.
Aphorism #16
“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”. –
While running
through the Sunday ghost
of a town
filled with semblances—
past the bar closed
after a kitchen fire,
then by the old
automotive parts store
turned tattoo parlor—
a phraseology of my phantoms
seems to express,
before I exorcise
the shadow of such
sunless thought,
its myth in Hemingway’s six word
short story, “For sale: baby shoes,
never worn.”
A couple emerges into the half-light—
out from the florist—with flowers.
When I reach another alley lined by backyards,
an inter-knotting of love and death
links back to images
of her first permanence,
which binds as lack
recognized in a prior refusal
from my symbolic,
to the idea of her loss,
uninscribed as a tattoo.
Those fictions return,
as if their nowhereness
were this real crushing under
a universal of gravity,
after I reach the quiet of a cul-de-sac,
where extremes collapse,
then, while walking up
the driveway toward home.
Alex Missall studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. His work has appeared in "Alexandria Quarterly," "Hole In The Head Review," and "Superpresent," as well as other publications. He resides in rural Ohio, where he enjoys the trails with his Husky, Betts.