Back to Issue Thirty-Two

The New Life

BY SETH SIMONS

i like my brain    it is made of phosphorus    you will not find it
    on the fourth of july    my brain has many powers    i do not
use them    they are like jellyfish    i fear their mythic proportions
    and affinity for melodrama    constantly munched on
by turtles    dusk-eyed    no sense of time    was it just yesterday
    i saw you    no    it was on the old planet    things were better there
i mean worse    i mean everyone was alive and unhappy    digging
    for scraps of paper    glass bottles    help i am stuck on this island
we said    help there is no more island    we said    how embarrassing
    to have been conscious    of so much pain    in my dreams then
i was always late    for a train    father yelling    i could not find
    the right platform    there it was    pulling away    and i was on it
and i would have both    the new life and old    futures that used to be
    possible    grasslands    coastlines    improbability of finding you
here in these dawn-lit ruins    horizons i recognize half of    halving
    again    gone now    imagine    getting what we asked for

 

 

Seth Simons is a journalist based in Brooklyn. He has received Fugue Journal’s Ronald MacFarland Prize for Poetry and the 2018 New Millennium Award for Poetry. His work has appeared in Rattle, Fugue, Conduit, GAZE, the McNeese Review, and the Breakwater Review. He writes about comedy at sethsimons.substack.com.

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