Skywriter
It’s calmer where we’re
not—look at
the clouds, moving rain
from tree to tree,
moving shadows. At
the bar we get an order
of wings, we use
our teeth, we take them
in, inside us now full
of wings. The air in here
is thick with words, it moves
around us, holding
the shape of us. Someone
paid to have
I LOVE YOU written
in smoke over the beach,
we watch it
turn back into sky.
My Twin
People see him everywhere—
he’s me if I were made
of rust. He was given away
at birth (hard to
say, maybe I was the one
given away). He’s
outside whenever I’m
in, inside whenever I’m
out. I pass him on
the threshold, a rusty nail
weeping up
from the floorboards, if I just had
a hammer . . . even
you dream of him, this
version of me, who has to do
almost nothing to win
your love. I’m the one
lying beside you, I whisper,
I’m right here, but my voice is
rust at the bottom of a well. No,
my twin is rust, I taste him
in each sip, but will I ever
be rid of him? We share
a heart. And a brain. And all
this skin.
Good Times
What lives inside us
is monstrous, it comes out
of our mouths at
night, sometimes
as a song, sometimes as
a word, the word used to pry
the jar open, the word bees
sing in the hive. You
crawled last night in through
my window,
don’t you want this?
you asked. Your robe
hung on a nail, your name on
a piece of cardboard
tacked to the wall. I told you
how I’d climb to the roof
& toss appliances into the burned-
out shell next door—dead
refrigerator, dead stove, dead
washing machine—silent
as they fell. I woke up one day
with nowhere to be, cold
pizza in the backseat, my pick-up
sideways in the driveway. I built
that truck around me, I tried to
warn you, I tried to warn
everyone.
poems and collages by Nick Flynn
Nick Flynn is the author of five collections of poetry, including I Will Destroy You (2019). He is also the author of four memoirs, including Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004), which was made into a film in 2012 starring Robert DeNiro, and has been translated into fifteen languages.
National Poetry Month 2022