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Michael Jefferson
Live From Luxor
And so outside the bar beside my apartment I begin to chain smoke and
say to Aman who’s 10 years older, I can feel my age catching up and I
am terrified of all of it, of course he laughs, he’s 35, my confession to
him must come across as a juvenile joke but I’m dead serious and certain
I have already run my course and wasted everything and all of it; whatever
coveted stipend that comes with being young. I am not happy, I am
not confident in anything other than the quality of my work. I text my
father then erase it, neither of us would have let the message go, him
for posterity, me because admitting to my father I am wrong is
anything but an asp in a basket before it bites the wrist and like Cleopatra
I will go down a God, not in gilded chains scathing my skin pulled by
elephants from Carthage, my line extinguished. “I am undisciplined, it’ll
ruin me, opportunities and everything I want will be
auctioned off to everyone but me in some foreclosure
when the time has come for collecting.”
Ode to "Stardew Valley"
Street Lights
I have learned window watchers ought to
keep aghast and agape mouths shut. Opt
against any conversation where receiving
end comes to clarity; what they have is quite
the caliber of a Gaga bluff, a face that won't
debuff the smile they are weakened to
the language that comes with Lannister
tongues of our abusers and our users
and our partners who in the end are simply
powerstruck and in position to then hinder
any rational decision to halt from
meandering along a jetty, high
tide, above seas that are tough.
But that's just how the world
is: A constant cunning of a greenlight
is prettier than some flippant lampost's
hum. Back against the current,
I'm so spooked by the past.
I’ve decided during Stardew, all I want to do is
fish, farm, devour copious amounts of
homegrown weed, lie in the fields
with my kids, claim, “Ancient astronaut theorists
believe Anunnaki came from that constellation,”
They, because they’re little, would, like Mulder,
believe and my wife would call me
stupid and that I’m making our kids stupid and I’ll
laugh and say sheeple like her are too main-
stream to see the picture that is
promised with the promise of
lightspeed: sentient seas, pre-sapiens
clayed Man by arrival of our
childens’ busy hands.
Why not let them listen.
Why not let me lie here happy
with our kids in the black
of fields she and I till together
to unmake the empty and she
will look at me, the way one
looks at things they love so much
it is vexing and sit with us, our kids and me,
point to Orion’s Belt and say that is where she
came from and every piece of me will sing.
“What’s the Point? You’ve Got To Take What Comes”
See, one time I met someone in a dim bar, wing tipped pretty
eyes I believed I belonged in. Saw myself happily across
from her as she pulls at my arm, to take a picture
of the orca beneath an iceberg, I like to think eventually
it discovers fresh air. Sent the picture to her sister,
think, “I’d love to meet her sister just to imitate what
it takes to belong in her orbit, a tidal locked full
moon. She says, like an Oracle, “I’ll be flying back
and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and
another for the rest of my days.” I say, “Are
you quoting Plath because we can go to
the jeweler to pick out your damn ring.”
Later, in the uber, I say to the uber, “Can you play
that song from Hercules “I Won’t Say (I’m In Love)”
I go and say I’m in love two years too late, exhausted
by the jokes we’d make of a dreamed up family, our
sick-in-the-head and beautiful kids, trilingual and so
talented Disney would come knocking with several
scripts in hand. Soliloquies are fever dreams, eventually
tomorrow and tomorrow brings you crashing from the sun.
Any Minute Now, Something Will Happen
And I think it’s fair to say I've seen
enough of it burn. Malcolm said, one
day he was home and then he wasn't,
I was slow on the uptake, I am picking
it up now. He meant, well, physically,
every kind of good thing just wilted
in a drought rot, devastating landscapes,
his body a dustbowl. I am feeling so Carole
King to Cole Porter, back against an
ocean ignoring a symphony of gulls
panicked warning of "so it goes" of
rows of teeth, ascending like the sun. In
which part of this novel do I turn to me
and say to me, "we must cultivate our
garden," and I nod and knead the dirt?
"Michael Jefferson is a twenty-seven-year-old poet from New Haven, CT. His dream is to direct films based on his own novels, where people talk in transatlantic accents over 1950s inspired original scores."