The Future of Boys

Abstract

70 BRIAN MICHAEL MURPHY The Future of Boys  Where the railroad tracks run into the sea and disappear, we wonder if underwater train cars used to slam into manatees, or if the ocean crept onto land like some evolving thing testing its mutation of legs. Nothing so smooth as these rails, except the headstones adrift in the beach grass, and the brass feet of statues we tap each time we enter the falling cathedral, its roof riddled with stars. We throw rocks at the stained-glass saints and seek a feeling, like the day we realized the paintings 71 on the nave walls weren’t paintings, but mosaics, tile bits the width of locust legs, like the day we found another piano, a hobbled crow, an unspent grenade, and combined them into one song. ...