Julian Randall
This poem first appeared in the Madison Review,
Fall 2015.
And Then Grief Became the Winter
and February became a parade of tight
throats and all the bottles went from
brown to empty while the wind slaked
its thirst for exposed skin and the sky
gave birth to whiteness again until
we just started figuring the sun was
a myth because we’d seen so many
bright things rising and falling again
without our eyes’ consent that surely
this was just another name we had
not forgotten yet and February was
a broken mirror was a mass of bodies
was the white noise of everywhere
was fists in pockets and everything
brown
suddenly
emptying
and I had too many hands debatably
too many names and everywhere
was slaking its thirst for exposed skin
and everybody was fragile like glass
and the room had been emptying
for as long as any of us could re
member and I started playing
at Prometheus kept smuggling
different names with me all of them
brown fit to slake my thirst or
remind me what the sun tasted like
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