Nick Visconti
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All day the branches
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All day the branches twist—drop-dead petals,
demolished symmetry; bygone fractals
levered apart and scattered over summer,
across; repeated. Again and again,
beside the moss-rich pond I wished,
as a bored child, could harbor red snappers,
horned frogs, sleeping gods; the frenetic
cold tap my mind drew out its dreams from,
bubbling senseless sense—why else wouldn’t I
have ever dived in? Wrecked bells chime
their tangled harmony. King Dog,
rain-ridden, in the storm beside me. Glyph-
light dissolving down the cratered mirror,
our coats darkening to match the weather.
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Dark-coated, our home
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Dark-coated, our home in hushed weather
dripping memorial. A hole, worn through
December’s discography, an eye ajar—
(The song refuses to resolve. Over-
cast recurrent intervals in loops
of a three-second fragment: allegro,
calando, Kind of Blue scratched to skips.)
Swept up in sound, I can see it,
as he could’ve been now: hair widowed,
salt-and-pepper, laughing crow’s feet;
his Mets lined up for a weekend sweep,
cacciatore on the stove. No silence
filling heads, lathing our living room,
a sound scattering the mourning doves.
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Morning drips, in the light
Morning drips, in the light between dove wings
as drones nibble on the dropsy dahlias
and shape them—flowers fledged so fully in
this reconfigured, open-window after-
noon, when Clair sits still, immersed in Gray’s,
compelled, inspiring compulsion,
more our father than I’d ever want
or like to be. Our-father-who-drove-off
for-work-and-never-returned: she knows him,
drawn immortal in her mind: Laurent,
the laurelled one. She couldn’t rest, safe,
content with what he knew. She learns sign,
symptom, syndrome, recrudescence, while I
wide-eyed watch the dropsy dahlias change.
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Nick Visconti is a writer living in Brooklyn. He plays softball on Sundays.