Two Poems: Mike Carlson
PAMPHLET ON THE SUBJECT OF WHETHER OR NOT YOU NEED A TEACHER It isn’t just you who sees the light outside the deli as a test, I measure myself against that glittering also. Sewer caps remind me of eye sockets. Moonlight flecks the asphalt where it’s wet with beer an old man spilled while waiting for his bus. If I find a knife wedged between two bricks in the side of an apartment building, or what looks like a cap gun stuck between an electrical box and a lamp post, the strings of my abdomen tighten around the feathers of what feels like an impossibly delicate arrow. I’m baffled by my desire for new kitchen utensils and bored with my pornographic memory of women with biblical names. I still imagine myself inexplicably triumphant and famous for jokes that every single person thinks of. I forget my friends have lost sisters and fathers, husbands and children, and that death is always recent, incandescent, and awful. I don’t know if you are born yet, or if your hairstyle matches your mood, or if you are suffering from something heartbreakingly