The Maynard
Spring 2018

Nick Alti

Never the Desired Absence

Without the opiates & lifted bottles with scratched off labels

I can eat the only eagle I’ve ever seen

where did you fly birdie     how does your iris taste fried     are your wings best enjoyed

glazed with mesquite     is your brain best ingested raw     my little finger food?

 

I’d always be on valium if I didn’t have to get it

by rummaging through Vera Bradley purses.

 

All I need is an abacus     to help me calculate an optimal apathy     a strain of salvia

so I can witness neon apocalypse     where body burns effigy until heart falls to earth

for any derivative of evergreen to sprout from     & Mother God advises me

 

though you’ve offered your life to the lord of all toads

you can make yourself carbon for heaven to grow.

 

Someone crammed a deer carcass into a trashcan outside a New York City café

which sold a lot of croissants instead of breakfast burgers that morning     I’ve seen friends

crammed in caskets from overdosing on things I found safety in     things I’d given them

 

I’ve been a vegetarian though I’ve been craving such burgers lately

I’ve let the dragon roam freely

                              though I’ve been craving such destruction lately

          it’d be misery if it weren’t so quiet

 

no itch so mighty as the Great Mistress Euphoric’s Percocet kiss

    deliver me GABA devourer St. Xanax saint of this new

less sapient Sodom     & looking over Lake Michigan I can’t take a single sip

 

without swallowing lake entire & all components within—

the haunt of phantom limb without losing limbs.