It’s like waking up and kissing a mirror good morning. The challenge is finding a reason. One approach is holding onto the ball, staying in bounds, waiting for the clock to run out. There are lots of reasons strutting around, flapping their wings, but they are often stupid reasons. Entire towns sell their souls for any number of reasons; people die for one, maybe two reasons. I had a pet chicken. Echo. He was my favorite chicken. Had him when I was a child (first chicken best chicken). Tonight the night is a black moth. A spoon grazing my lips. Tonight the night is a black mouth. They killed my favorite chicken. Tonight the night is a black month or a red month. It’s December. A man passes a door three or four times before he realizes it’s the way out.
From Invisible Bride
Tony Tost is completing his MFA at the University of Arkansas. His work has appeared in the pages of Fence and Spinning Jenny. Tost also co-edits Octopus, to be launched in August.
Tony Tost’s Invisible Bride was recently selected by C. D. Wright as the winner of the 2003 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. We’re pleased to be able to present three poems from Invisible Bride, two of which were previously published in storySouth, and one new poem from a project Tost calls “Dead Birds.”
Invisible Bride will be published by LSU Press in 2004. In the meantime, you may enjoy more of Tost’s poems elsewhere on the web:
“I Am Not the Pilot” at The Cortland Review
One untitled poem at Canwehaveourballback?
“Twelve Self-Portraits” at Typo Magazine