T.J. DiFrancesco
T.J. DiFrancesco is a writer living in St. Louis. A resident of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, he went on to earn an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He's currently a marketing copywriter. His work has been published in Rattle, Best New Poets, The National Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review and elsewhere.
Hum/Guts
New Orleans, 2006
As if translated through water, my voice in the respirator—Pieces of the organ, Pastor, where do they go? We gutted the chapel and lined up the pipes in order, Smallest to largest. A ribcage missing a few relics the flood had made off with. There are patron saints of lost objects, lost causes. Is there one for us, one of Loss? Of the labor of starting over. Of living like a photograph—how it used to look. You live a little and suddenly your whole life is up in frames. Stations of what
You bear and in this humidity it might be enough to pray for a simple breeze That might strike the debris at just the right angle across the mouth of the pipe And crack the air like a flute into song.
Teeth/Break
There’s something you should know about the end: it’s too late for too late. I can sum up all those failed seasons in a few burnt summers, warped wood. High water lines where the brackish water killed the Spanish moss. Cicadas Detonate from the brittle trees. It’s time again. What have we missed Most? They say never saw what you can snap clean. Never leave what you can burn. Its that feeling again. A trick knee, no weather. A familiar dislocation. I know how the hand understands the boot. I wake from the dream with someone Else’s teeth.
Jonah
My love is the kind of catfish that eats dogs. No mutty little thing
Sieving river for its dinner. It noodles for poodles, lives in the bend
Where the water get brackish, blackish. That fish. Come by my house
I’ll show you it mounted. Come round if the mouth is
Open see yourself in, but on a kettle of brine for tea. Turn up
The burner and we’ll keep an ear out. When the sea simmers, it sings.
UGLY PRODUCE
The Marketer is rethinking beauty.
When it comes to lemons, he only wants the ugly ones.
It’s not their asymmetry he loves; not their imperfection.
Not even the new market for turning garbage to gold.
It’s how you see yourself now that draws him in.
A new reflection, things backwards.
We are flawed and full and beauty.
We eat what we are.
SELF-PORTRAIT OF THE MARKETER, NO EARLY BLOOMER
Go out. There are less stars now than when I was young. Fool-thinking,
That the universe wouldn’t fade, wouldn’t be me.
It was one of the best year-over-years to date.
Bless the dabblers, I plagiarize, but mean
I’ve memorized the charts showing home
Telescope power as a function of time and it’s not the same
Way computers got smaller, but we see what we want.
“The standard regression efforts a heat map.”
How many summer months a teen girl in Nadaville,
Where the empty hills velvet in bolting grass saved up
To spend a chill night tracking Saturn across the sky.
How many years a Dad on a roof in Mina City streams the live feed
From the ISS while following its real-world cameo
Across the moon’s flat face.
Or others of my successes.
Invented nostalgias.
Didn’t it seem like yesterday you could actually meet someone
With whom you had had nothing in common—
but the distance was never quite right.
Yesterday the nation voted
On the world’s best fast-food hamburger and it was
The seeds on the bun like someone put them there. It was
The right combination of never-frozen beef
And enough emptiness to make you crave the double that put it over the top.
Hidden in the wrapper, quotes from a lost gospel of prosperity
Describe the concept of inherent good through stock footage
Of dew-soaked lettuce and tomatoes colliding in mid-air.
The soda effervesces refreshing.
Every ad from a corporation is an ad for corporations—
Fiscal conservatism, I believe it’s still called.
If the issue is that we treat corporations like people, sure,
But just look at how we treat people.
What could we bury in a capsule that wouldn’t be misunderstood in 50 years?
It’s too hard finding cassettes. What about b-roll.
How about a battery.
I write down, “the problem, as always, is intention.”
And if you didn’t mean it like that, I’ve got bad news
For the future. I can see it way off and it doesn’t take a scrap of imagination.
Who’s heard of Dick Fosbury? I begin
something about disruption. The PowerPoint’s got a title like
‘Not All Test Drives Start in the Showroom’
And the conference room quiets on a picture
Of a mustache in short shorts and knee-high socks.
The short version is the marketers already know he changed high jump
Forever by landing flat on his back in a pit of foam rubber.
Dick the Innovator. Goodbye to the old way—
Running right at a thing and jumping, scissoring the legs to clear it,
to stop looking for a better way to jump, but a softer way to fall.
Down come the opening credits.
In my show, this would be the episode where we step out of the room,
Hi-balls in hand, into the desert air, head back to the roadside motel
Where we meet a guy who passes out shriveled buttons of peyote.
We watch a cactus bloom like a trees of fingers.
We see in geologic terms the Earth, which is elsewhere,
Sink its milkteeth into our metallic hands.
In a flash, through the haze of cigarette smoke, the trip ends
In earnest and the blacklight poster of the sky recedes into itself
Like the old dark.
And what you could see in the space of a minute
Made a decent slogan in our minds.
Us opportunists call freedom the same thing you do.
I come to with claw marks all over me.
I ask whoever’s Jeep this is if there are Band-aids in the glovebox
And why they’re this particular shade of pink.