I lean on a lamppost, as if in an old painting:
A Drunk on Broadway, 1905.
Not a vacuous type of man:
A son of steel workers and shipbuilders,
A son of knuckles and pipe wrenches.
The corpse is kitchen clutter,
its glass bottles eyeless
with savage angles
that promote decay, float mold,
and witness tragic hands of Solitaire.
Blame the architects my fingers know,
sick with powders,
sore from tracking patterns in static
and acting out battering rams
of juvenilia; operate, cloud a house:
The smoky air, the sleep of dogs.
“Habit-forming” manifests
as a theatre in yards of unraveled socks,
sick days that wander like zombies,
The blur over the face of a witness.
A wishful sculptor sleeps here,
picturing a surface scalded and lunar,
distended like galaxies; a body between
wood and lead.
The scissor-trim of acid trips
cradles words with white.
The history of apartments
drifts in address books
with the names of women
whose memories become
burn victims thimbled in gauze.
Stokely Klasovsky graduated from the College of Charleston in Charleston, SC and is currently an MFA student at Bowling Green. Originally from Youngstown, OH, Stokely once worked on the literary magazine Crazyhorse with the editor of Jellyfish.