The Literary Review
The Aeronaut
Appetites billow the nylon.
Young love and glory
Lift your bright balloon.
Positive thinking and sweat
Remainder age. Denial
Elbows the envelope out.
Passions collapse. Farewell’s
The whine of My Way,
The gondola’s guttering self.
New Year’s Eve, 2020
Covid and Zoom funerals, hate
Radio, cowardice, circumscribe
Your own kidney stones, stents and age,
A late, poetic, coinciding of demise.
In the first, the best of Star Wars,
Our heroes find themselves flotsam
In trash compactor slime, an octopal ogre
Blustering death, fee-fi-fo-fum.
Resolution: finally yoga, finally the diet,
Midnight wine in sacramental toast
To personal, public peace and quiet.
The walls stop, the Dianoga goes.
Aubade
Red, bedside digits read 6:30,
Followed by day, date and month.
The house creaks in a sharp, March wind,
The boiler fires.
In windows, earliest light resolves
The yard and garden, an apple tree.
I’m as one with pillows and blanket,
The alarm set to far-off 7:00.
Three squirrels, a ribbon of squirrels,
Tag madly around the trunk.
Hours
Your fingers find home
as they meet
across the back
of my freshly shaved head,
guiding my tongue deeper,
stretching your soft voice louder,
capturing my name
in the nonsensical speech patterns
of passion, the star-skyed night
still young, the serious morning
still hours away.
- Victoria Twomey
