Gone Fishing
Violets in the Wash
I’m amassed versions of beauty, disguised as passable truth. Here: can you see the lies I told, the crushed violet blooms.
I bowed to Cara on her alcoholism, about a staged life. I was silent on Jake’s vacant photography, about an emptiness. Like
I lost my dear friend, Wesley, his family choking him out, his Queerness hated the worst way. Imperfect fit is a kind of beauty,
I said— find a seed inside, grow in the smog. But the seed was pestilence, and he died on a motel noose, no Jesus, no goodbyes.
Even the air I breathe unlocks a door. Even peace is a business. I spread his ashes in Yosemite, and I talked about his mother.
Looked straight where God is supposed to be and shouted, Let love drown her, touch my lips with the cusp, wink the fool
universe awake. Wesley is gone. What would have happened if I had opened your heart with mine. So, put it in the laundry,
run it through the whole cycle. Warm water and the softeners and anti-static dry. Is it old Walt Whitman clean. Is it love.
Note Passed from a Citizen to the Outside World
This much is true: we are not well. I saw lavender blue out my window. Heard the mail truck putting away, end of a working day. Warm thoughts like marigolds. As the hours softened to
doze, the neighborhood lit up like peacocks in a Diane Seuss poem, each line squared to the whole as if pressed for time, like a letter to a self already silenced. There’s a yearning for an open
mouth, the silkweed in it, tender dandelion without hope, but the determination of a good bird dog. Everything breathing and breathless. What have we done? Porchlights glow yellow, glow
through my burlap curtain. I fall asleep in my lyrical straw chair, the yearning never slack, hand-bound chapbooks of my life trilling like baby birds on the tongue, and this is nothing like a
horizon— no dividing line. Our mouths, beaks, hands, wings intersect redemption, absolution, delusion, martyrdom. I will balm my thoughts when lain upon our mattress in the inky night
and will play the unrepentant possum. No crying while dark red years descend as locusts, coagulating clouds into ravenous shrouds. Last bloom, inner rooms, green world, fire. Help us.
Michael Dwayne Smith is the author of five books, including a forthcoming poetry collection, “Shaking Music from the Angry Air” (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, late summer 2025); his work haunts many literary houses, including Heavy Feather Review, Ethel, Third Wednesday, New World Writing Quarterly, decomP, Heron Tree, Monkeybicycle, and Star 82 Review. He’s a recipient of the Hinderaker Poetry Prize, the Polonsky Prize for fiction, and several Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net nominations. He lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family, rescued horses, and Calamity the California calico cat.