from Out in Jasper Johns: Gray

IV.

This can’t be a lesson. You can’t call on your sea lions here.
Sometimes another evening calls for skeeter sound.

I soak my legs in a brackish pool after a piss
poor job of exerting my chest to my knees.

Evenings have nothing to do with the lament of those lions.

There’s an event where I’d bubble another version of my body to feel
the bounds of my shape. You’d hate an emblem of flight and branch.

Rolling burgundy in a field that seems to cream.
He who smudges its potential against his cheek.

The sea light levees in the corner.

The admiral swivels salt in his mouth before he’s set to crunch. You dismiss
me into a sigil. He departs into the gray, while the landscape adjusts.

I assume the position.

V.

The painter in question games mutual desperation.

Poseidon has a destination in mind.

I wake up thinking that a bulb bursts from the lamppost in the aftermath of a gust.
A future stitched in the bleach. From orange to threadbare, we go.

I no longer have a forwarding stance. I brisk stout in a shirking of hue.

The gallery closes early in the afternoon. A green light stammers. Perhaps you recall an innocent
lake—

An inner child games the correspondence.
Men who declare themselves otherwise cat by the docks.

No need for introductions. Another captain explains her defeat:

Your innocent lake is endangered. Paddle on.

Spencer Silverthorne (he/him) is a poet who holds degrees from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, University of New Orleans, and Kenyon College. He's also the Poetry Editor at Rougarou: A Journal of Arts and Literature. Recently, his pamphlet Occasions for Listening was published by Buttonhole Press. You can also find his work published or forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, COUNTERCLOCK, Dialogist, Dream Pop Journal, Gigantic Sequins, Surging Tide, Verses of April, and elsewhere.