Thomas Brush
OUTTAKES
Take out the dirty clouds, forget the missed connections,
Who was early, who was late doesn’t matter any more
Than the shame of the god of make-believe who brought us
Here where we don’t want to be, waiting for another take
On this sagging sound stage of rust and regret, repeating lines
As weightless as the smoke shrouding the wooden horizon, under cover
Of the last green sky, last lure of oblivion,
Last heart-shaped birthmark, sometimes
Red, sometimes bruise blue,
That we carry like a guilty secret, like a director’s cut,
A rehearsal for this life
Or the next.
Thomas Brush has published in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The North American Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, Tar River Poetry, as well as other magazines and anthologies. His books, all from Lynx House Press, are GOD’S LAUGHTER, August 2018, OPEN HEART, 2015, and LAST NIGHT, winner of the Lynx House Prize, in 2012.
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