Two Poems
An Ongoing List of Things Found in the Library Book Drop, Usually Being Used as Bookmarks:
An orange peel.
A rusty nail.
Hopes and dreams (long discarded).
Multiple credit cards.
Fourteen googly-eyes, pristine condition.
An unstamped passport.
Love letters (multiple), some surrounded by an aura of violence.
Miscellaneous cash of various denominations.
A baby ultrasound.
A birthday card from gram-gram.
A Polaroid of someone else’s wedding.
A phone number accented by a lipstick mark.
An unused tea bag
.A used teabag.
A crumpled poem scrawled across a cocktail napkin.
An anarcho-socialist manifesto in exquisite handwriting.
Every poem is a manifesto.
Every manifesto is a love letter
tucked inside a book,
one in particular reading:
of all the infinite universes
only a handful have you in them.
Those are my favorite. Burn the rest.
Every moonlight tower I meet is a new friend
and every friend is a moontower
shining brightly upon the summer night.
In poetry they say you can’t be too precious
but everything is precious to someone.
The moon was so precious that they had to build
the moontowers, decoys of the real thing.
Faulkner said to Kill Your Darlings.
It’s difficult to learn how to kill precious things.
Look at the sky on the first clear cold night,
that’s a one hundred year moon there,
close enough that it looks like you could pick it
Right out of the void and take a bite.
Enormous to the border of absurdity.
A fixed obsession
free for anyone bothering to look up.
God damn that’s a great moon but
when is it going to hatch,
spilling buttermilk across all of heaven?
Sam Treviño
Sam Treviño is a writer, poet, and literary organizer. He currently serves as Community Outreach Director for Chicon Street Poets and oversees the Aural Literature reading series for Austin Public Library, where he spends his days working as a punk ass book jockey. He wants to have a conversation with you.
Twitter: @whiskeydynamite