TONY MANCUS / 2 PIECES
From Same after Life
Your head is a pew, you drape its curve. Your empty palm, pass the plate along with three dollars pulled from your pocket to stifle your candle-lit worry. The trace of a thought in one dream as it’s drawn across thresholds—your tiny form against a massive door, pressing, odor. The still nimble bodies bowing into their wrongs, a haven few feathers commit in their writings—to dip the pull up fully and be muted again. What the gravel knows in each swallow may be how dark the space of its landing. The coast stands in as congregation. How a quill buries itself into a cord of rope, or a sword gets swallowed with no measure for the harm it harbors—the hilt a stopping point reached by the hands—they say up to here and no more.
The p(r)aying proper.
From SAme After Life
Your head is a maple, you stud it with grackles—make the beaking sound a precursor to something other birds do when gunshy, the raised roof above them only a hue off from crying as the pitchy veins gather other colors through their cell-ruckus. When you painted the windows shut the neighbors thought it was an easy firepit. The layers of soot, the bust of a basement window with rock hurl and fast hoofing away. Out front the cars pasture, they blimp along like a parade. I lift the stock to my shoulder and forgo the naming of parts. Bolt and action precursors to what murmur is a cloudlike motion of birds.
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, including City Country (Seattle Review), Subject Position (The Magnificent Field), Bye Sea (Tree Light Books), and Apologies (Reality Beach). He lives with his wife Shannon and three yappy cats in Colorado and serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse.