by Will Hochman
"Marriage License" -- ""Cat Prism" -- "A Nib Electric"
Will Hochman is the Director of Writing at the U of Southern Colorado, poetry editor of War, Literature & the Arts, and a reviewer for Small Press Review. His last book of poems was Stranger Within, l993.
Marriage License
Always the moment before the moment,
always the about the before begun,
we live on land that is shaped
like a finger pointing beyond
--its
tip barely touching water
or maybe it's two fingers, a doctor's
touching jugular to check pulse...
Our home is a peninsula
connected on only one side
and always
struggling
to keep whatever worlds we think in
spinning when we're
not lighthouse there
to give ground
and grace to its waterways
Once we question how anything
touches anything
without rock or
water,
it means to never again think
about touching
so that
we're always new light
finding old words,
so that without knowing
before,
and without knowing until,
you shine
and feel like home
Cat Prism
Ray is not a verb
I looked it up
But I swear
I felt some kind
of marvelous action
When the last piece of sun
Rayed light
Before going down
Like some bird whose delicious
Last feather
Fell
It's no different
than the classic
American difficulty
With
death,
There's something
In our national ego
That won't let
dying
Encircle us
Without asking
For more time
Or at least a
chance
At another verb
Shining somewhere new
In some other sky
A Nib Electric
the disk slipped in my hip
pocket which always rockets
when words
fall in the right eyes
like lost films of our lives
run perfectly by
covering each
sprocket as if we were babys bibs
of pixilating
screens
the moment the lights go off
we see perfectly in the dark
eating signs of newborn life online
we rye accident catchers
jack when gravity goes virtual
