Poetry Night

Written by Kat Mulligan

With the sun interred by the moon

and a black sheet cast over its body in decomposition,

poets rise in great numbers like eyelashes at the notice of morning.

The door snaps its fingers, a good and musical segue to silence,

then the epiphany comes: the room is prolapsed,

and the host is unobserved.

Ensnared by the spiderwebs that crease my quiet avenue

like reassembled porcelain,

the poets shake themselves loose from the yellow clamor of soirées

and crawl into the metro.

The rusty park swing set,

which howls from ecstasy in couplings with the ecstasy of others,

tonight has no company and no vigor.

No one remains—the young darkness has riddled its night with holes,

and sorrow is a lonely fluid.

I am too pretty to go dancing with ten o’clock

and no handsomer beaus.

My cheek arranges itself in pouting on the shoulder,

my fingers wrap around that miserable clock hand.

The jolt of the door has tied off all music,

so in the memory of noise we mimic a lousy waltz.

The best thing to do now is disengage and wash the dirty cups,

their stale water rippling with the echoes of poetry.