American Darkness

Poems by Tyler Wettig

American Darkness

A Publication of Third I Press

Fonts used are Cavolini, Dotum, Impact, and Palatino Linotype.

Front and back cover artwork by RavenOrlov:

https://www.deviantart.com/ravenorlov

All photography by Tyler Wettig.

Other chapbooks by Tyler Wettig:

Men in Togas Looking at Fruit (Zetataurus Press, 2016)

The Adult Table (Zetataurus Press, 2018)

Babylon Burning (Third I Press, 2020)

Fallen (Third I Press, 2021)

www.tylerwettig.wordpress.com

www.pw.org/directory/writers/tyler_wettig

A native of Michigan, Tyler Wettig resides in Cleveland, Ohio. American Darkness is his fifth small collection of poetry.

CONTENTS Fear and Loathing in Reno 2 Apathy 3 Self 4 Animate 5 Secretly Cruel 6 Two Museum Stills 7 Epiphinal 8 Appurtenances 9 Man on Fire IV 10 Beyond Belief 11 The author thanks the following publications in which poems in this volume originally appeared, sometimes in different forms: Commonplace, Ephemeral Elegies, Ohio Bards Poetry Anthology, and Pseudopsychosis

she

Genesis: “Invisible Touch” 1

Well,

don’t like losing to her it’s still a game.

Fear and Loathing in Reno

Our morning view: the burnt and bright and haze of last night’s burning sage. No time to waft, so nibble the remnants of the fast food and get in the truck: we’re heading East.

We doze through Utah sulfur, wax Fitzgerald through Lovelock: "Now there is a woman!" But we’re closer to Gethsemane than the Riviera: stuck on the tracks in Wyoming, axel breaks in Iowa.

She takes my hand and asks if I believe in God, but I burn like a Buddhist in protest: so scoop me into a cheap urn; I’ll sit on a shelf like my dad, or just the dashboard. Can’t feel my legs anyway.

2

3

Apathy

The seasons, so rich with asides: “they grow duller they pass me by.”

Self

4

-destruction, it would seem, is always a trigger away.

As we are men, we are weak: the feral perfumes of our loins unabated by our greater muse, intuition, with our faces for all seasons like pockets of change.

We are of the ways of the old masters carvers, molders, and melders of slab and stroke seekers of our covenant's yin, that great patchwork of the sexes: confounding we progeny cave to grave.

On mornings when we can still come to, blessèd be alms of matrimony, hormones, madness: for blessèd are the contrite but remember the shadow: it gives us light.

5

Animate

Secretly Cruel

That night you invited the witch doctor, I took it for a joke: your love was madness for a stage, and I was complicit.

I coated myself in salt as you wished, your pitchfork at my back, and ran my naked trembling body under the broken faucet that ran as cold as absinthe jitters into bile nights.

Only by a chromosome would I have ever called you a stranger, but that night I faced the fact: my friend was one scary bitch, and she was never coming back.

6

Bust on marble plinth: Bacchus and paintings of Rococo breasts. Oil on canvas: ingenue maiden so curvaceously Rubenesque.

7

Two Museum Stills

We had a love gone allegro con spirito: Immense, desolate. Uninhabitable.

Epiphinal

8

Appurtenances

I have scruples about collecting: never wanted for decorative clutter. I’m also drinking more than I used to but no more than you. So, as you would say, let the anisette flow tonight lets count each thread of our silken throws and chintz tapestry. And then, just listen: a city down there is alive. We’re alive! But me? Just aloof: blind in the bokehs of the stars’ shimmers and those streetlights

we can’t touch.

9

Liquored-up and confessional, all I can think about is your man— and I'm really getting off on that. You heard finer things tickle me so, but this could be religious.

Man on Fire IV

10

Beyond Belief

Lying next to you is a waking dream: your face glowing in the morning sun and my caress all tangled up in red.

I did dream the previous night of my life before this one, and it was a terrible nightmare: but in the marvelous embrace of this love, panic flees my soul and I’m freer than I’ve ever been.

11