Upon Hearing the Magic 8 Ball Thing Has Twenty Sides Inside
Under an electron microscope
everything’s a life
raft factory dual-use
school house Bauhaus birdbath
cathedral. In the mirror though
it’s mano a mano and that’s
just the fists of the eyes
shadows so obviously blunt
force dreamlife. Here
in the blue waves forgotten
for years then fucked with
in interrogatory bursts I talk
a lot about the second law
of thermodynamics but was
really just going to die all
along. This whole half year
I’m a fifty-year-old and
a three-year-old and we haven’t
really worked out our power
sharing arrangement yet. O
god it’s so stupey. I am
just trying to figure out why
the broccoli’s so bad lately.
My brain curdled I mean
look at it. I’m having
trouble getting out of bread
in the morning. That’ll
cast some shadows down
the page then after that it’s
flashlight tag and you don’t
want to bring AA's to that
sleepover.
James D'Agostino
James D'Agostino is the author of Nude With Anything (New Issues Press), The Goldfinch Caution Tapes, winner of the 2022 Anthony Hecht Prize (Waywiser Press), and three chapbooks which won prizes from Diagram/New Michigan, CutBank Books, and Wells College Press. His chapbook, Gorilla by Jellyfish Light, is forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press. His poems have appeared in Ninth Letter, Forklift Ohio, Conduit, Mississippi Review, Bear Review, TriQuarterly, Laurel Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Truman State University and lives in Missouri and Iowa City, IA, with his partner, the poet and book artist Karen Carcia.