Three Poems by David Malone.

 

Lovers Disappear Inside Devil’s Backbone

Love, let’s go ahead and take time out of the equation.
It’s just a featureless t anyway —little more than x
and even more self-conscious.

Let’s put you and me together in a white room—
in a black room, and we’ll be brown and areolaed
and landscapey and long and sinewy and humped.

Let’s go ahead and take the world out of the equation.
It’s just a small w on the cosmos line of infinity anyway.

 

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Mirror

Last week,
you make
a Nobel Prize-winning
scientist
finger a revolver
and take ten paces
upon himself
to fire
into the expanse
of what we all could be.

 

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Beyond Expectations

One comes to expect
the expected. But you break
the thumbs of expectations—
a bar bouncer twice your size
who folds in half beneath
the twist of your wrist.
You ring out in the whiskey night,
the roar of space
shuttling through atmosphere.
You snap all the galaxies
into pea pods of loving.
The pock-faced bouncer
can’t return to work
because he doesn’t know
what to do with broken thumbs,
or sugar snap peas.