When I say everything in the world can look beautiful,
I mean we don’t. I mean the newlyweds on Fremont Street
are drunk on desert sweat and casino light, dancing from bar to bar
like a thousand gemstones rattling inside a cavern, while you and I barely
manage to glare across this cocktail table, having forgotten how to touch
without flinching. Inside our skin we’re little more than towers of bone
and I don’t know how to keep us stable without tenderness, the vow we made
to treat each other’s wounds like faults in ceramic. Maybe we’re cut too deep
for mending. Maybe we should try imploding like the Stardust—
wouldn’t it be nice to unearth a boon of buried poker chips
and remarry at every neon chapel on the strip? To collapse into something
bigger than ourselves for a change? Let’s start small, like plumes
rising from an aftermath or pools of runoff leaching opals of lye from ash,
one black grain at a time. We can press the demolition between our palms
and call it a beginning.
Sameul Piccone is the author of the poetry chapbook Pupa. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southeast Review, Passages North, Arts & Letters, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, American Literary Review, and others. He serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review and teaches at Nevada State College.