OXIDANT | ENGINE : Issue 4
gary lundy
i keep hearing your voice which can't be your voice
​
when i look around the room i can find no one to match it to. perhaps losing hearing comes with the accumulation of frivolous voices. pronounces their willingness to disappear. perhaps they will never arrive on time which remains straps connecting our wrists. of the moment earlier when we sat outside the wind chilling and my hand rubbed up and down your crossed legs. intimacy incorporates the ignorance bound in moving boundaries of the skin upon skin. lampshade dusty with underuse. or the time i anticipate seeing you all day only to find you missing after all. our stories barely come close to the kind of telling we all look forward to. they once mention the idea that the only keen insight we can have of ourself comes from the words and actions of others. i don't know about that you say pointing out how easy it is to manipulate the facts to suit desire.
​
​
how excited we became seeing you sitting there
​
visiting when they pointed out the photograph failed due to skewed depth of field. a splash of color above the eyelashes makes clear a meaning otherwise awash in misunderstanding. but i have no hips to hold the skirt in place. you smile and nod in understood jokes on us. nostalgia is filled with cheap tricks and erasing gestures enabling us to dismiss intuition to enter a space filled with chosen forgetfulness. to reside anywhere better than where they find us. wrapped tightly around a thought of you choking on what's been left unsaid.
gary lundy’s poems have appeared most recently in Antinarrative, Virga, Firefly Magazine, Cleaver Magazine, and In Between Hangovers. His fifth chapbook, at | with, was published by Locofo Chaps. each room echoes absence, his second full length collection, will be published this winter/spring by FootHills Publishing. He is a retired English Professor and queer living in Missoula, Montana.