burke

4X2

an online poetry journal

Photo by Melissa Hotchkiss

  • Poem

    by Sean Burke

    This cloud was refurbished
    by an online merchant
    who works days as the moon's half-eaten orange

    and blinks in near-perfect intervals.
    His taste in atheleisure's renown.
    He wants you to notice

    his detailed attention to things
    but not desperately so.
    He wants you to note

    his ham-fisted means of time-keeping,
    slightly slantindicular
    and at a purposeful remove.

    He’s writing a novella
    he’ll never read aloud
    because he can’t pronounce the word thistle.

    It’s about a podcast host
    who asks celebrities
    like McConaughey and Chalamet

    what words they trip over most,
    laughs as they stumble to spit them out,
    and then pleasantly analyzes

    meanings the words may hold
    before they strip off their clothes
    and metamorphose to dark green fritillaries.

    When he gets home
    his husband boils the water
    and they slip out of life like a t-shirt.

Poet's Statement: Honestly, I don’t put a lot of thought into what I write. I write from a compulsion and hope something interesting presents itself. That said, to me, this poem addresses the entanglements of identity and self-erasure. With varying degrees of recalcitrance, people desire to make marks—to make a mark professionally or creatively or whatever—but we also feel the balm of letting go, an urge that can arise almost concurrently to disappear into work, love, celebrity podcasts, or little green butterflies.

Bio: Sean Burke lives in South Berwick, ME. His poems are published or forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, Powder Keg, The Destroyer, past simple, and Jellyfish, among other journals.