Issue > Poetry

Michael Homolka

Michael Homolka's poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in publications such as Antioch Review, Boulevard, The New Yorker, Parnasus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares and the Threepenny Review. He grew up in Los Angeles and lives in New York City.

Anamnesis

My final self fluttered once
that version which isn't
waiting for anything
and flexible in its adherence
to a particular time period
I was napping alone
in summer noon whatever
century the daylight resembled
when the world of allegory
and metaphor let fall
tiny Roman statuettes
onto my bony intestines
So sprouted other
inwardnesses more manifold
more true debatably
and more mournful too
I felt made of marble
I felt gods in my blood
It was like there was nothing
wherever I'd lived before

Museumish Love

Boys of crumbled eras
persist in love still sorting things
out with each other (I can

feel them) by the same off-pink
pale coasts that have messed
up my mind for decades

I feel toward you I feel
in a way that could still serve
some existential
purpose in physical space

Mythlike almost (as far as
what I've read) the way we're shaken
by adjacent afterlives
in this very modern grove