By Scott Neuffer
Trip: NYC, 2023
I will say on the plane over I saw elevators
descending in passengers’ eyes.
I will say when I saw the Empire State Building
it was pointed in the gray light like a compass needle—
if only I were built stiff enough for that sky.
I will say at the Met, the Monets were less than lustrous?
What’s most real in New York are the lurches
between bricks, the way a corner splits
sense,
sewer steam, snuffed ass,
the ache of the unfeted.
In dusk I come to 83rd Street, metal bench.
Crouched hand to ear, I assume it’s blood running
through my head that makes a gritty sound,
and I wonder if every person also shudders
at the thunder of their own blood.
I will find my way back to you, I believe.
There is a world where we listen to each other;
it lies at the bottom of the poem.
Pondering the Art of Poetry during Super Bowl LVII
We didn’t host the party this year;
a broken patio chair sits against the house.
In a friend’s neighborhood to the north, where the river touches
the desert and grows the Northern Nevada Correctional Center,
I sit in a luxury chair and dream of mass transit
that took the copywriter from Brooklyn to Manhattan
for thirty seconds of gloss, their million-dollar slot–
but something is off, human.
Maybe before the game the copywriter had a moment
pulling a snake of hair from their apartment sink
and sink from drain in a miraculous fit bruising the drywall.
Maybe it was enough to remember how ink can bleed on the page.
It’s funny how I am not alone but want to be alone
as the TV commercials glow like radiation,
and the prison windows gleam like half-decisions.
Inside me is something like ice on fire, primal, without ink,
conjuring words to stay lined up dancing in the air.
Scott Neuffer is a writer who lives in Nevada with his family. He’s also the founding editor of the literary journal trampset.
