SurVision Magazine

Blue Assemblage with a Horse


This blue night expels its white horse
through my bedroom window.
Along the hillside the pink and yellow houses
marinating in winter moonlight,
and slowly and not slowly

all the warm places decay.
At first I didn't like myself
standing at the end of the checkered hallway
with my dented brass and sheet music.
You made me turn a funny color,

I couldn't breathe when you looked at me,
and when you looked at me
how easily my jaw broke off,
just a solitary look from you
in your blue doorway

and it was like the wind
passing through the web of a twilight spider.
The earth manages a full rotation.
There is humming and the whistling of steam.
What a strange, beautiful machine

you've asked me to set my teeth upon,
O sexless mover of the priest
that floats above my bed
with four legs kicking
and bright white hooves.






Friday Afternoon as Spiritual Autobiography


I have driven a nail
through an orchid.
I think of you,

Saint Augustine,
gathering fruit
for your false priest,

as your mother floats
above you.
Now my face has left my face.

Though I am firmly planted
in the Midwest like a corporation,
I want to sing hymns

to milk and forget I was ever lost
in the woods, guided by syringe
eyed children.

That was so long ago,
but I am still a little boy
sitting in my mother's bathtub

with my broken leg,
and my mother in hysterics
on the phone

trying to find someone with a car
to drive us to the hospital.

I don't ask my face where it's going,
it's somewhere strange
and beautiful.

If you should find my eyes,
my love,
don't cover them.






Threnody


The old men enter the white barn.
They leave

in fitted white tuxedos.
Everything turns pink

after you rain.
The cow blinking away a fly in the tall grass

was a starved calf last spring.
The stains are fresh

in the air,
some are gray and some are black

perpetually above the New River Valley
in southern Virginia.

I am turning back
into an egg I remember

when my baby brother
had his turn

on his messy bed in the summer.
Later that night my hair was wet

in my mother's white tub,
and I cried

because of the things I said.
In the dry winter

she gave birth to him all over again.
I kissed him on his red face

all over again I am born
gripping my cracking mottled stone.




Christopher Prewitt is a writer from Kentucky, USA, whose poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in Vinyl Poetry, Merida Review, Ghost Ocean Magazine, Four Way Review, Inscape, Iowa Review, Rattle, and other periodicals.