Last Thursday | David Gonsalves
POETRY
8/2/20241 min read
No one at the conference could remember where they had hung their harps.
Not a single sociologist cared about the insomniacs and their ironing boards.
None of the philanderers wondered about their undelivered letters.
Across from the courthouse, no one emerged from beneath the rubble.
None of the nurse practitioners understood how Mahalia became Mahalia, or why.
On the way back from purgatory, no one wanted to abandon the radioactive milkweed.
None of the distant relatives could remember how to formulate the four questions.
No one asked to be dismembered. None of the newborns looked tired.
After the afterparty, everybody realized that nobody really wants to live forever.
David Gonsalves should have been born in Nepal, but wasn't. The former editor/publisher of Tin Wreath, he lives in a cave beside a river that flows both ways, and has poems appearing or forthcoming in Ping Jockey, Jeremiah's Fireplace, and Eve Of Distraction.