Vagrant Tercets
by Christopher Munde

Georg Trakl

Above ground, hoarfrosted snow, its uncontrolled
Substance, patterned with Pompeian hollows,
Where bodies once, in vast discomfort, embraced.

Margaux Hemingway

Soul which is charted: Itself a body with thermography laced
Flaunts in her face the burning address of each pressure point
Loitering in the throat from generations past like one long swallow.

Veronique Le Guen

Gives birth between each station in an empty subway car 
To a litter of mole pups, her palms upraised like in tableaux
Of saints. The offspring ply commuters with sedative-tipped claws.

R_____

It isn’t quite a haunting, the way it reoccurs each night
Outside a Manhattan bar, but more the clockwork of revelry:  
Throes the second heartbeat of one more delivered unto xenon light.

Ivan Chtcheglov

A city through which light wanders in perpetuum
To slither up the Eiffel Tower: Two urbanisms converge
Until eyes dry still and homeless in their labyrinth.

Elisa Lam

Dropped classes, doses, clothing; call this passing anything
But through. Chewed up in pixelated security tape, loss
Now urban legend: Call this drifting anything but story.

Christopher Munde’s first poetry collection, Slippage (Tebot Bach), won the Patricia Bibby Award, and his poems have previously appeared in Blackbird, The Literary Review, Massachusetts Review, Third Coast, West Branch Wired, and elsewhere. He is a graduate of the University of Houston’s MFA program and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. Presently, he lives and teaches at Jamestown Community College in western New York. Here is a link to his website: christophermunde.com.