Issue 11.1 Fall 2015

11.1 cover image

 

About the Author

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident. Recently published in New Plains Review, Perceptions and Sanskrit with work upcoming in South Carolina Review, Gargoyle, Owen Wister Review and Louisiana Literature. 

 

My Land of the Lost

 

John Grey

 

Is your mind a region of space-time whose gravity prevents
anything, including light, from escaping or a dolomite cave
so maze-like, so pitch black, that being lost is the only option?

Whenever I sit with you, I look beyond your dead stare

 

for the switch that turns on all the power inside.
I haven't found it yet. Your silence mocks me.
I must carry on a conversation with myself
otherwise I too will forget what it means to talk to someone.

 

So where are you exactly? Floating in front of a large
Magellanic cloud? Deep in a Hawaiian lava tube?
Sad that I can only think of you in terms of astronomy
or speleology. But once humanity is taken out of your equation,

 

what's left but the sciences. The nurse comes by.
She doesn't need the Hubble Space Telescope to see you.
She forces two pills down your throat. I wonder if I
should mimic her actions, stuff words down your ears,

 

try to squeeze them into some place where they can
still be understood. And here comes the doctor, He's
more interested in the clipboard at the bottom of the bed
than your sorry body. I know the type, the guide that

 

takes a tourist far into the deepest, darkest cavern,
and then only he makes it out of there. He smiles in
my direction. But his mouth means nothing to me.
It's your lips I want to hear from. But they're shuttered.

 

My problem is that I'm waiting for dying to be
transformed into something more like love,
not stellar mass or countervailing impossible cavities.
Sadly, your grave will be so much shallower than where you are now.

 

 

<< Back

Euphemism Campus Box 4240 Illinois State University, Normal, IL 61790-4240