While You’re Breaking Beautiful
James R. Lynch
I will see Jesus
But also shriveled dicks and microballs
And Orvieto’s lazy racers
With their slow waving hands & diesel fumes
I’ll dwell on the banks
Of cathedrals and churches
Intrigued by
How the bodegas were carved
Out of cathedrals
& the cathedrals were
Heaven manifested on this earth
But none of my research told me
The flusher would be a button on a wall
And it’d be a mortal sin
If any of this country became de-
Consecrated, just one more space
Where the paintings are
Priceless and the gift shop is overpriced
How the sign outside where
Keats and Shelley are buried warns: “This is
An active graveyard” As if to promise
Cartwheeling ghosts at that sun-dead afternoon hour
Where the shops close for l’ora del pisolino
Don’t break the spell yourself
Out of fear
—-it will inevitably break
Like the ubiquitous pottery bits i kick as i walk
How blue lights can give the impression
Of water or how fortress hill towns
Suggest human nature–
I’ll remind myself how some hearts, fossilized,
Don’t burn
How what is breaking
Can be beautiful (how beautiful I feel)
Yes, the inspiring Roman pyramid
But I, homesick, was more enchanted
By the chunky tabby
Laid out on an immortal slab
Curling and uncurling its tail
Half closing its eyes in feline affection
I’ll have to make peace with putting on a button
Down and the creased pants,
With pro-wrestling and playstation and cheeseburger
Assembly lines and the not chasing of
A poet’s dream of euros and ducklings
Behind luminaries
I’m not ready to let go of this travel as salvation
To, bags down,
Having to ask you, love,
Are you healthy?
Do they have any plans
To make sure you’re ever healthy?
I don’t want to ask how old can a boy get
I have to admit I hate that
It took your disease
———-to finally make a man out of me.
James R. Lynch writes short stories and poetry in Northern New Jersey. He has been published in Beyond Queer Words, Darker Than Night, Dark Mirrors, and Saints and Sinners: New Fiction From The Festival.
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