Better Angels II M. A. Untch (bio) Stars crept through bedroom windows to feed the dark.Everybody became a friend that died.Blitzed desire tiptoed in from all directions.Wintered, feverish roses bloomed on yellowed sheets.Not me, thinking back as far as I could — whodid I touch? How many sheets spilled over my bed,silent as snowfall, the lamps off, the tapering whispers,and the sunlight just beginning to rise over shoulders,over the trail of an arm, a strand of damp hair?Clothes paraded on floors like torn sacraments.Elegant bodies unbuttoned on the bed,each cell became an ornament filled with bright blood.Donna Summer all summer until rainsshattered sex into brilliant little pieces.Newspapers were silent, televisions, mute.Neighbors closed their undulant blinds.I danced and drank because I didn’t know what else to do,two a.m. and everyone out of breath, tying it up, kissing the starved.You could see through them, the dying,like stalks of celery shimmering in vodka.I saw bodies taken out of the sun, folded over,carried like laundry baskets full of beautiful clothes,heard doors closing in the hallways of Cedars, St. Mary’s,their corridors of grief, the color of breast milk.A decade of bruised gardenias grew.There were pills that made you sick, cures that made you die.I heard families afflicted as if they’d been shelled,saw patients in robes without slippers, drapes without ropes.I walked with my brother,a daisy wheel I plucked each day,so happy the day the radiologists burned his face clear.It was like making a wish, blowing out a candle.It was everything and nothing. It was an extra day. [End Page 337] Afterward, I wondered how the ground grew anything.I read unconsummated novels to pass the decade:Werther at the fountains chasing waters of unknown bliss,Dostoevsky’s hollow cheeks bounced off chandeliers.We were all moving to Moscow, weren’t we?Like Ranafskaya kissing the drapes,the tender flesh of the walls, her horses turning theireyes to look back one last time, toward whatthey remembered, as if human. As if.It was the long dark hall of the eighties. It was nothing.It was Diana the hunted. The touch of her hand, a singleflame. And all the falling for decades, we, whoheld flowers in our mouths, held photographs,held the dying, each someone who had gone before us,before me. We held the family dog.I couldn’t touch the morning so I kissed the mirror.I kissed my arms. I lay in bed, kissed the dark.I couldn’t touch the evening so I kissed the mirror.I kissed the mouths of telephone receivers.I kissed the word goodbye.I kissed Larry Kramer the night Larry Kramer kissed me.I kissed caskets. I kissed graves.I kissed my brother’s face.I kissed his dying.I kissed everyone who ever kissed me.I couldn’t touch the evening so I kissed the mirror.I kissed the covers of magazines, the creases, the folds.I kissed what no longer moved.I kissed the silence. [End Page 338] M. A. Untch m. a. untch is an emerging writer. Recent publications include Beloit Poetry Journal, Poet Lore, North American Review, Confrontation, Nimrod International, Painted Bride Quarterly, Chattahoochee Review, among others. Copyright © 2019 The Massachusetts Review, Inc
Read full abstract
Jan 1, 2024
Apurva Lambat + 3
Open Access