"City of Confusion" by Peter Leight

All day long the dark part of our city is lightening at the same time as the light part of our city is darkening—the walls are creamy and lumpy, like tapioca, and every door is a double door, as in a restaurant, swinging one way then swinging back like the kind of interpretation that depends on what you think:  we’re not even sure where we’ve been. There are chairs in the middle of the sidewalk where you don’t usually find furniture—when you sit down you don’t even know what you need to get up for, is it time?   All day long the lights are bright then go out altogether, and we look at each other the way you look at something in the lost and found, something that belongs to you if you can only find it.  It’s true, we often mix up the fight and flight signals, covering our teeth and uncovering our thighs, swerving or veering unnecessarily, turning to the side or turning around—everybody says you need to remember where you haven’t been.  Narrow homes appear on wide streets and wide homes on narrow streets, like a kind of mirroring—it’s dark where it is light, as if there’s a dark source inside a light source we don’t even know where we are when we’re right here!  People ask you where you’ve been when they don’t even know where they’ve been!  Of course, it is easier when everybody is close together, walking around together, checking on each other or holding onto each other, like a microphone that picks up everything, I’m not even sure what this is an example of. 

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Peter Leight lives in Amherst, MA. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New World, Tupelo Quarterly, and other magazines.

3 Poems by Kelly Dolejsi

The Lost Jockey

He wrote rattleboned, he wrote after soup,
he wrote in his banker’s suit and turpentine
that we are capable of liking what we like,
spilling out of bed each day like chocolate milk
or pipes or lenticular clouds or madonnas
and the others, the incapables, sleeping
and not liking to sleep but also he put them
in the dainty branches, a see-through forest
of glass trees, glass squirrels, a collector’s
dream, somebody’s dream. On his horse
in his gray stripes and painted-on hat he wrote
prose to unborn granddaughters, post-scripts
to Mary the blue sea slug, Chris her brother,
every shard in the whole trampled scene.

The Commuter

Thoughts continue toward yesterday,
always giving way to sameness as gnats 
do, as newly cut blades of front lawns. 
Again, I wonder how to head home when 
home multiplies, when I scatter my wish 
on too many stars. I head home. It is night, 
and so warm I could sleep on a branch. 
I listen to steady light rain on the shell
of a wandering turtle that every few years
I return to the creek. I feel both ankles
in the familiar broken ice at the bottom, 
and hear another girl breathing next to me 
in the snow. I gallop away, sure that I’m a horse 
and that I’ll never think about this day again. 

Vigilance

Midnight, children quiet as painting
of saints in a long hallway that no one
has ever entered. Midnight, our bed
like a long gray whale, its belly pressed
like one tine of a rake into the zen garden
of the seafloor. Midnight, your hand
on my leg like a major seventh minus
the third and the fifth. Midnight, is this
what it’s like to be immortal? Thing after
indigestible thing, each one praying
silently and yet I hear them all. Midnight,
and yet day comes — I wake to see a deer
in the backyard, and I wonder how what
we grow could possibly keep him alive.
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Kelly Dolejsi’s work has been published in many literary journals, including Cincinnati Review, North American Review, Denver Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday, Broken Ribbon, The Hunger, West Texas Literary Review, Timberline Review, Junto, Gravel, Dirty Paws, The Hungry Chimera, Joey and the Black Boots, and The Disconnect. Her poem “Loyalty” was nominated for the Best of the Net, and her contribution to September 11, 2001: American Writers Respond was nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Additionally, her chapbook, That Second Starling, was published by Desert Willow Press in 2018.