Alto-relievo

Seth Garcia

There's this dream you can't seem to explain me
as after you asked how long the plateau

had been the rind of an orange-pucker smile,
your teeth waterfalling out from your

mouth, not as a plethora's self-consciousness but more the Perseids,

all thirty-two burning

themselves off in the atmosphere.

But there is no dream, it's mundane as palmar grease,

dull as the hands of love.

For who to find it first? Broken
roll down the mountain by the boulder's edge.

We're trying to fit the furnace inside our chest,
swallow the blood as it comes ashen

out from the apples, refit our body
to the bas-relief battered in its shipping crate, a marble antique so-long swapped

for the counterfeit the roles have reversed.
We turn to cough,

but for the mirror shards' song behind us.

The asphalt's cool to the touch, the smoke-blackened

battery of our shared lung. The obit won't over,
there's shrapnel pooling

on the pillow, sugar sealing shut our waking mind.

Why not shape grief one giant blue-shaded eyelid

on the moon's grey pools? White-tide

moments of high warp in brightly quiet rooms,

the Xanax bottle left empty

on the counter, the body to be
found in the neighboring canyons

thirty-one hours later and in what shape?

Seth Garcia is a writer previously based out of Boston with a BA from Emmanuel College, where he founded The Saintly Review.