David Greenspan
David Greenspan is the author of One Person Holds So Much Silence, forthcoming from Driftwood Press. He’s a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Southern Mississippi and earned an MFA from UMass Amherst. His poems have appeared, or will soon, in places like Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Creek Review, DIAGRAM, Prelude, Sleepingfish, and others.
An Act of Composites
Something said about the selfish quality of light.
Study our kidneys most animal. Also lichen,
child of algae and fungus, stupid and kind. Oh to be
primitive of throat like salmon, to open
our mouths and show pink all the way down. Edges
muddy, we become the commodity form’s new marrow.
I admit I am more guilt than pollen.
Mother the saying we will get paid and carry a mouth of figs.
Why these teeth? Why not, we ask,
breath full of incubation and other misfortune.
The time between exposure and development
spent learning to clean chicken liver.
Forget the bloat of yogurt after days of not
eating. Speech bubbles
sprout, petal, begin their clot as we shiver
new uses for water.
Residents in the Ward of If We Can’t Live as Human,
We’ll Live as Syllable. Join us
umbilical and diapered in celebration
of cruelty, of signs which don’t read
we buy horses.
All pharmacies smell the same.