Michael D. Snediker

one poem

Cor Caroli

Lower fringe figment.
A plume of matter still beside

fished skittish from
the pure arrear.

An impasse salvaged
from clouding as
a quiz from

the rumor of
our formerly transponding
selves.

*

How I courted
that tenderfoot in Horatian
bursts of mishap.

Sulked teeming
into the floor, paddled out
to moot point—

bashful & spent-ebb
as another
me.

*

Wherever we perseveratingly went
the magpies of
magnalia yondered.

Our resin apostle’s unheard of
blindness wearing out
this coat,

carrying these arms.

The reprieve from inwardness wasn’t
as expected, feigning as we did
not to be “involved,”
any longer.

*

Stunt monochromes to the wind, a cold
change chained around the doom,
a coddling.

Hesitantly the future returns

as temperament
quailed in entropy.

In this capacity fogging over
some negligent miracle squalled
under

in the shell, awaft.

*

Their rubric gumming
of anecdote pries

our abandonment lesson from the tines.

To sing myself
the weight of a drone swath
inkpot. To sleep

in aperture in
exchange for steadier
piers,

before the line becomes
a space in madder.

*

Vandal whetstone come-on

cruising an ode in
the new barn,

wakening a weakness for rough pigment.

Whatever the story belonging
somewhere else, a newly scouring travail
in the wool of inquiline.

*

Seeing as the skull

whose cradling couldn’t anything
anymore than this erratum
of arrows.

A fontanelle, at any rate.

Where the deer
nearly spired.

*

An oblique place be-
mazed in waves, a pulpit afloat
in the impasto moat.

Was it Cindy Sherman or Saint Jerome
who sealed our ships against

the desk dark Scylla of law,

Pegasus bareback briefly fed
on pulse sparring wth
what was left of

the arabesque.

*

The seagull’s ever fainter
geotaxis.

*

A bagatelle a bagatelle a face
like the agate
morn.

A felted face-like quibble.

*

Having drunk each noon
his utmost
vegetable health.

How we defended
his dignified cliffside
masque

catching in
the tunnel rust.

*

So we crept again
through the dove-house, this house-
broke shrine

of trance in
tender.

Stretching the glove
to bury our phoenix on
swallows hinge.

What was concord to the warm
sutra of will, this intimate
vagrant tethered to

the tasseled edge.

Michael D Snediker is the author of two books of poems, The New York Editions (Fordham University Press 2017, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize) and The Apartment of Tragic Appliances (Punctum Books 2014, Lambda finalist for Best Gay Poetry). He's also the author of Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (U.Minnesota Press, 2021) and Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitous Persuasions (U.Minnesota Press, 2009). Poems from his most recent poetry manuscript, Meanderest (a finalist for both the Test Site Poetry Series and Tupelo Press's open reading period), have appeared or are forthcoming in Action Spectacle, Blazing Stadium, Interim, and Prelude. He is the recipient of multiple residencies at Yaddo and the James Merrill House, and is Professor of American Literature & Poetics at the University of Houston.