Jacob Foppens van Es’ Still Life With Oysters (1616-1666)

I Love My Horse

Her eyes like lazy olives

Hung equidistant from one

pink opium den

Captive, windowless

in my white apartment

I love to take my horse to the beach

I love how she prints her hooves on children’s resting faces, ugly, unfamiliar,

Dawn lights another fruitless cigarette

Orchards full of trees full of bloomless branches

Abandoned outlets face every plug

Like banished mothers, their ovulation

magnetized abyssal, circled with incisors

Wherever I ride my horse, everybody applauds

One thick embrace of unknowing

in my blindfolded vanity

Where once were stars I’ll seed my nerves

wherever you go I’ll disregard

Smoking

Rather than organs 

I’ve got fossils 

Athrob in deprived haze 

Like petroleum 

Or the sweat in your hair 

My children, you will starve 

My children, you will starve some nights 

Because I resent time and time’s loss, 

And I can’t act otherwise 

And they found me by the dumpster 

Sliming my lips with gore

We could go to the zoo: 

Where mirrors line giraffeteeth 

We could let the orangutans 

Smile at us 

We could eat the candy apples 

Them boys forget 

Littered around our manholes

But the sun is a bug whose loathing’s all life

So I’ll just dream

On some porch cavity

Miming useless like 

I never heard your name

PJ Lombardo is a writer born in New Jersey. He holds an MFA from the University of Notre Dame and he serves as co-founding editor for GROTTO, a poetry journal. Recently, his chapbook HATE, DANCE was made available by Bottlecap Press. His work has also been featured in SPECTRA, Mercury Firs, The Quarterless Review, Lana Turner Journal and elsewhere.