Christopher Citro

It’s Only Me the Toyota with the Bungeed Muffler

We accept the small yellow apples
that drop from the woods behind us,
roll through the yard, and end in the street
where they are crushed. Why does it smell
like cider at the mailbox? Her little boy
on wheels, the plastic car sounds like a fox,
angry at having its path blocked, exploding
hot breath through rows of small teeth
as ungracious as its tail is—yes—gracious.
She’s pushed him up the hill. Meanwhile
the sky like the inside of a shark (over us all).
Meanwhile your watch hand needs replaced.
You get out the superglue. What do people
in mansions do? Last night 3 a.m. when
I left the postcards to go out, lifted the flag,
its click expanded beneath the street lights.
A dog two houses over stopped barking.

I Want To Reach Out and Hold Your Reach Out

You act like we’re both under water
and I hadn’t noticed till now, so thank you.
Laser beam sounds always made me feel
right and sort of proud in movies. I didn’t
make the wires stretching everywhere.
Seriously. We need to talk to each other
so badly the mountains, the ocean, that
woods where we walk beside bubbles.
Some machines tore a groove through
the ash trees to get at the wires.
We’re sometimes like starving people
sitting at a banquet looking at the skin
on our hands because that’s what we do.
We fill our hands with our eyes.

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, and his poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, West Branch, and elsewhere. He lives in sunny Syracuse, NY, and his favorite sweet these days is tres leches cake. Holy moly yes!