I have not eaten any of your poems, true
My teeth went through and parted them
Before I realized that they were only clear, wet,
And bittersweet, nothing to digest
Except a tide of highlights, verbal kicks
Not worth absorbing or breaking down.
I am not saying your words did not glow,
For I held your lines up at night
To guide me from the bed to the bathroom,
They shone in their spines like the moon,
At my destination, I read them over,
So that I could shimmer away the boredom.
You put down a maze of sentences,
At the end of every line was a cliffhanger,
Every period fell like an explosion,
I said it before, those poems glittered,
But now I only remember the effect,
Little better than a kind of sparkling laxative.
About the Author
Ben Nardolilli is a scrivener and a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Door Is a Jar, The Delmarva Review, Red Fez, The Oklahoma Review, JMWW, Quail Bell Magazine, and Slab.
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