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Unless You Catch the Darkroom Spirit

 





Two times blessed and I’m wired in.

Snow’s swallowing the doorframe

and I’m tangled down. A clanging

in the cellar and I’m loosened up.

Your canines at the collar

and I’m quiet now



*



Hardly hunger I
responded to

that morning that safe-
light as it filtered

used to be your shoulders
when the negatives approved us

to compare to takeoff
with the deep as with a garment



*



At the limits of the lamb
one eyes closer

to the aperture,
stepping over soot and all

at once unplugged from zero,
it’s another aliveness

piercing the picture-
house, unsheared outlets

feeding in my quiet
like a softer carnivore.

Say “mine” again
the storm dies too



*



Can’t follow can’t follow

cold light flipping through me, can’t

cordon off the turbulence

of photons in the shutter, can’t

I slip a little on your music, what catches

in the body’s wilds, snake-eye sniffing

precious at the neck of, prayer of



*



Some alphabet corrodes

this photo of my body

(three times bidden)

punctum where the air

forms a darkroom outside

the wind’s left open

all night, my boys left

to roam the mercury-

me unsees me from this

shape, printlessly

and giddy too




*



Tonight you’re not the same
you transubstantiation.

You’ve lost your sentence
and your cards.

Tonight the air is not
retained the same way.

Molting from the corners
of the envelope

to field the edges
of repudiation.



*



Buried back
serrated fang

his tongue
done wedding     

species lack—                         
walking thru

if spit
were true

I ember-waded
frantic summers                    

petaling    
 


John Bosworth is a writer from west Texas. He is the recipient of the 2018 Most Promising Young Poet Award from the Academy of American Poets, & a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He lives in Philadelphia.