Nathan Spoon

 

The Angels and Frogs Are Speaking

for Danielle Pafunda

 

The way out of this dream is through
a document     more specifically

a .docx file. We are all sitting together
under terrible florescent lighting

and overhearing the noise of too many
machines. Someday spelling mistakes

will fix how fucked up the world is. Until
then     it feels nice wearing a cap to help

block out the garishness. And headphones
to cancel the howl of― Wait! Now a woman

is saying Nobody is going to marry Ken.
Why is she saying it like this? Why am I

overhearing this in particular? In ancient
times nobody spoke about Barbie and Ken.

They hadn’t been invented yet. No matter.
If any one of us can dream any moment

angels and frogs are speaking     it ought
to be OK for a file to triplicate a rabbit.

 

 


 

The Day After

 

There is a lot of presentism
to the handle of a butter knife.
It is the main reason I keep
half expecting Marianne, hair piled
atop her head, to make a comeback.

One day I walked alone along
a shore until there was no more left,
but nobody can say they are
together still. Honestly, this
current murmuration has split

and converged so many times
I no longer know the history,
except to say that, like every other
history, it is all too much. What
I am doing is looking out a window.

I am also feeling the sentience
in the back of everyone else’s throat
before feeling it in the back of my own.
The dead, like the eels they often are,
really need to learn how to scroll better.

 

 


Nathan Spoon is an autistic poet with learning disabilities and “low academic fluency” whose publications include Poetry, Mantis, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Oxford Poetry and the anthology What Have You Lost? (HarperCollins). He is the author of Doomsday Bunker (Swan World) and My Name is Gretchen Merryweather (hardPressed poetry). Senior editor of X-Peri, he is a 2019 visiting poet to The Ruth Stone Foundation Reading Series and has read his poems at the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University and the ALSCW Conference.


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