Knife slicing the living night,
nacreous river, we’ve stood waiting for you
many times before. And still we wait.
River of departure, arrival, departure.
Container of all ambition, you make us
what we are: employable, fuckable.
Night-blue finger tracing the lake’s shore,
airstream of avarice and hearts askew,
carved into the suddenly valuable land
of broken-down homes and buried
children. Our hopes, our bodies fill you,
conductor, with metal cheeks,
200-watt eyes offering glimpses
of bedrooms, over-stuffed chairs and
their punishments, storefronts
lit like flames. You carry day traders
dressed for sentencing, mothers
working on resumes, outcasts
busking for change. In your care,
a steady ticking, the learned comfort of metal
on metal, the caress of night feathers.
O snake among the roses, we
await your approach, the cold snap
of doors flung wide open.
In August, Mike Puican’s debut book of poetry, Central Air, will be released by Northwestern Press. He has had poems in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review, and New England Review, among others. He won the 2004 Tia Chucha Press Chapbook Contest for his chapbook, 30 Seconds. Mike was a member of the 1996 Chicago Slam Team, and is past president and long-time board member of the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. Currently he teaches poetry to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated individuals at the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center and St. Leonard’s House.