The Migratory Patterns of Lovebirds
At dusk, I watch the wind seduce foliage through
the binoculars of an aesthete, taken by how the
petals dance like flames thankful for a brief life.
The days are shortening. An explosion of silence
will arrive soon, the temperature will descend to
indifference. In the wake, tree limbs will resemble
my own fingers: slender and anxious to dress
in whatever is willing to hold them – hopefully
your hand curled around my finger like the foot
of a bird round a branch – but you have made flight
for the weekend, or a season, in search of a warmer
place to nest than the space between my neck and
shoulder. At least, this is what I tell myself when
I feel colder in your absence than is justified by
reading the thermostat. I presume you would call
me a sap for this thought, like a tree claiming it still
feels the beak of a woodpecker drilling its heart for
sweetness. It’s just that I’ve come to see loneliness
as breezes poured too suddenly into emptiness not
ready to receive it, such as my ears at mention of
your name inside a question of whereabouts. Answer:
somewhere over the horizon. But roots like me have
difficulty in moving. Grow to be depended on as
they grow, their anatomy stretched from reaching
for things that aren’t there. Things that lay over the
earth-bend, like you, for a weekend or a season. And in
accordance with the verb of this season, I will fall for
you near September’s end. You will soar over the
horizon until a revolution of instinct completes itself
and lands you in my arms again. You will perch there
and rest. I will support your weight without snapping.
We will pinch the wings of time together with our lips,
so it, a hummingbird with precious nectar, doesn’t fly
off without our consent, because all we are trying to
do is make this last. Make this the last time the willow
weeps a bayou. Make this the last time calling your
name brings a pigeon instead of a dove. Make this
the last time your feathers have itch for movement,
as lovebirds weren’t meant to be migratory. They’re
meant to couple like lines of poetry according to the
meter of their drumming hearts. For some time, your
heart worked without making sound. Gave you life
but no music, forced you to question if you were the
very genus of adoration. But understand you are what
you believe, a marvelous creature blessed with flight
and the luxury of not needing to use it. You, who taught
me that if gravity pulls at each with even temper, the
difference between leaves and feathers lies purely in
my mind, so I think my shoots into aviators, since that
makes us the same kind: two inkblots in the binoculars
of an aesthete changing seasons can’t erase from sky.
Dead Leaves
for Cameron
If autumn is metaphor, it insists the loveliest
things in this world are those leaving it. Dying.
If my life is poem, my little brother is metaphor.
Lovely. Leaving. Dying. For the sake of aesthetics,
we can call him November. It’s fitting flesh. He has
reddish-brown skin and half his heart is in a grave.
in plotting his own demise he forgot I would be home
come December. Maybe I’ve been the end of him
from the very beginning. Even our mother
dressed us in synonym. He always struggled
in his English classes; he couldn’t define
himself outside of his relationship to me,
so now he thinks of life as a prison sentence.
We only talk through telephones these days.
I recall every call vividly. One in particular,
sounded like a wrist being slit, a voice running dry,
my brother contracting into himself
like an unspoken secret. A tender laugh
caved between his cheeks. A blush surfacing like smoke.
He burns for the sake of another’s happiness, since he
understands you can’t be a martyr and die
of natural causes. So, he curves his mouth
into moth wings. Kisses the heat. Swallows his
pills with a lava flow of vodka. Monk-like.
He’d been squinting at his prospects long enough
to turn the golden-twine of a noose into a halo.
People aren’t leaves despite how easily they fall.
How foolish we are to consider suicides stunning.
Awestruck by their cold and colors,
so neither finger or protest is raised;
I can only wonder to myself where folk
go once they’ve fallen to the ground.
I imagine he ‘d say they don’t ever reach heaven,
that he couldn’t find the Lord even while high.
I imagine that’s the essence of depression, but he knows.
Melancholy holds more mass than Catholics do.
He is the heaviest prayer that I have ever lifted.
He needs help, but doesn’t feel easy asking for it.
Not from me. But I understand, because we’re
brothers down to the blue- jeans we’ve shared.
We both bow out when bowing down goes awry.
We both draw into ourselves like wrinkles.
We both know telephones aren’t happy places.
I wish he would see we have more in common
than the surname chaining our hearts together.
I tell him this, but he can’t see
a locket through the skin.
I tell him his skin should not fear the touch of splinters.
I tell him they are the price of building beautiful things.
I tell him that his spirit is beautiful. I tell him he is black.
I tell him that his spirit should be skeptical of tree limbs.
I tell him to remember. I tell him to always
remember: dead leaves lives behind.
Cortney Lamar Charleston was raised in the Chicago suburbs by two South Siders, but now lives in Jersey City, NJ. He is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania and its premier performance poetry collective, The Excelano Project. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Rattle, Word Riot, Lunch Ticket, Storyscape Journal, Chicago Literati, FRACTAL and Kinfolks Quarterly, among others.
