Monsters
by Clay Cantrell

  1.     for David Berman
  1. your desire for hill fog
  2. is forever my fault
  1. you live between broken razors
  2. and these final caresses of heat
  1. yet we persist
  1. even when instructed to speak
  1. to our damage
  1. magenta gathers
  2. above distant hickories
  1. distant as disco now feels—
  2. god’s infinite roses—
  1. summer
  2. cries through our skulls
  3. in majestic wrecks
  1. say it’s meadow mania
  1. or a kind of nervous breakdown
  2. known only to the dead
  1. or grandma in her hospital dementia
  1. call it what you want, but
  1. at night we hold our breath
  2. and guilt shines on my
  1. hip pants like sunlight
Packingtown Review – Vol.14, Fall 2020

Clay Cantrell holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Memphis. In 2015, he moved to Tulsa to pursue a PhD in Literature at the University of Tulsa. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sycamore Review, New Delta Review, Birdfeast, The Journal, and elsewhere. His MFA thesis, Hermit, Wraith, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award. A full-lenth book, The Landfill Poems, was published by Red Dirt Press in 2016. A chapbook, Spooling the Luminous Junk, was published by BOAAT Press in 2017.

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