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Mike Bagwell
The Year of the Rabbit
We are entering the season of orange air
and other kinds of radar reports. Don DeLillo
takes these broken wings and reads them
like tea leaves. People are out there in the smoke
performing normal acts, becoming punctuation
when they’ve gone far enough, the sun struggling
to read anything but still inventing meaning.
Even when the double beat of her heart
is a canyon of beauty, I hold up
the year of the rabbit, my baby,
like a lantern to light my path
through the dark house
shouting BLOWOUT, BLOWOUT.
Later, Tina caught me
rocking a book of poetry to sleep.
Suitable gifts:
tapestry kit, CD, fine wine, easel, book of lyrics.
Maybe the simultaneity of our thoughts is what Bosch
was getting at when he affixed two ears with an arrow,
the full scope of the cosmos just a blade listening,
marked with a B for baby and me. Maybe it’s time
for a “You are my sunshine” and a little sleep.
Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer based in Philly. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and his work appears or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, trampset, Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). He was the founding editor and designer of El Aleph Press and his work can be found at mikebagwell.me.
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