Jukebox of the Golden World
Alexandra Munck
Till we’ve perfected ourselves, I play these songs of joy
and of sorrow
plucky vibrastops—
1
Take for a beginning that grass mountain
You built up from beneath the earth
Not by pushing though we all assumed
It was not long before those of us who
Took an interest in you
Saw you digesting
Molecules into monocots
Straight and thin
Razor bright
Vanishing to a point out there
Grass mountain
And called you Slim
2
Little riffs of gelid jazz brushed a shy spine
Shot zips into the atmosphere
Static and lightning, unbalanced air
Agitated electrons
Rushed here and there
3
Run to me like iron to an anvil
We will build and bide our time
Sniffing the fulvous wet air
Slowly darkening our skies
Until white things glow
Your lily trumpets
Played for us, jitterbugging
In the hailstorm
The pretty reservations we wore
Came clattering down—
4
—Bright day is reassuring
After a scare
Carefully parted, we retire
To think on our own things
And thank God for what we’ve missed
5
Now
When that insect ba la la and the
little damp
Hairs and your cool meal and long
afternoon
Lengthen with the weather just right all
together
That way it’s like the world remembers
your childhood too
6
suss suss
Suss suss songs
Through the night
The moon asked
Low and heavy
Over lumber floating
Care to touch?
I am reet
I am mighty
I feel of chalk and
Will coat your palms velvet
I answered
No, my round dearest
Though you ate your fill for me,
You can only ever be
Rodomontade
pennyshine twang
The moon pierced itself on a tree
Collapsed
in clouds of chords
7
At last we were in a place no one else could find
Some canyon with a gash of a river
That slit open the layers of our fastness
How could we resist its slow, violent lovemaking?
We sat on the banks and braided
Our frayed ends
Light faded
Faces rose
To the blue slit at the top of our sky
Where we had just the hope of an exit
Hey Slim
You and I
We did it well
And all
—playing comfort out here
on the guitar you left
my hardbit fingers walk along tall tales.
Alexandra Munck has filleted walleye on an island in Canada, hiked down a gorge in Greece, and gotten lost in a car park in Nottingham. She writes poetry and speculative fiction from her home in Illinois. Her work has previously appeared in Lackington's.