Recess
A cartwheeling script
of broken music notes
tumbles from the tip of my pen:
a row of children
swinging their legs,
propelling their bodies
across monkey bars
that flex between margins.
Recess is cut short by rain.
I blow my whistle
& crumple the playground
into a ball in my fist.
I toss what’s left
of daylight into a wastebasket
that still needs to be emptied
of yesterday’s snow.
At the Getty
The illumination of the manuscripts
is dulled by the shine of the bullet-
proof glass that contains them,
though in the Gothic
novel light of the exhibit room
it’s the unwavering doubt of the dead-
as-disco scribes that seems as if
it could swallow the hollow
points of an unhinged museum shooter.
Their silver & golden scripts,
pure as graffiti, their marginalia,
sinful as gum under desks
in the classrooms of Dante’s Inferno,
pierces the walls. Dragonflies
born of their styluses gallop,
berserking the serpentine borders.
I can’t muffle the buzz of their ghosts,
the residue vibration of stained-
glass wings that ricochet off
the tips of the letters on
a page as yellowed as a Medieval
sun setting on the Dark Ages.
Outside, the same sun sets
on the dawn of the 21st Century,
where the gardens have all been so beautifully
strangled into perfect right angles.
The docent who summers at UCLA
gets lost in the topiary labyrinth
on her fifteen, wanders among a pride
of manscaped lions, Snapchatting
with one hand, getting a fidget
spinner really going with the other.
Larry Narron’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Hobart, The Brooklyn Review, Whiskey Island, Berkeley Poetry Review, Phoebe, Literary Orphans, The Boiler, and other journals. They’ve been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. Originally from Southern California, Larry currently lives in Northern Michigan, where he serves as a literacy coach for elementary school students via AmeriCorps. He is the nonfiction editor of Dunes Review.
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