Douglas Piccinnini

Poem with Suffering

alone, upstairs, the spirit worked
‘til extinction—the body blanking

out by its own grammar

“you”—“you teach
your hands” with your hands

by the dayskin by nightskin you are in

as something as light as eternity
smears a look on your screenlit face—

if only the “virtual”—
but the virtual—the “real”—which?

unblessed, tumid, blue year:

you become yourself in spite of yourself

Winter in Place of Spring in Place of—

lapsed passwords, sleeping pills,
warm compress to the stone whisper
cyst bulge, ache.

A house is like a house on fire.

In a dream I lose
my teeth and in a dream I piss
into the still-blazing embers of fire.

The last grape of consciousness is devoured.

The greener days among the greenest seem identical.

Outside the earth is a scorched, blackened ball.
Inside here there is no news at all.

Douglas Piccinnini is the author of Blood Oboe (Omnidawn) and Story Book: a novella (The Cultural Society). Piccinnini’s work has recently appeared in Boog City, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Elderly, Fence, Lana Turner, Nat. Brut and Prelude. He lives and works in Lambertville, NJ.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.

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