Poetry: Selections from Izzy Maxson

Power Outage

 

My house in the cool grip of a power outage

Surrounded by police cars, where a drunk driver hit a pole and knocked out the power, to seemingly just my apartment

Inside without checking the fridge for signs of rot I think about The Bermuda Triangle

How one day we stopped thinking about it

And in a fit of hunger it consumed itself, there in the middle of the ocean where no one could see it thrashing

This kind of quiet

All eyes in the real dusk, my cats call out for their dinner

A sunset

I step inside

There are two options

Airplanes sound different in the springtime or haven't you noticed

All these quiet policemen

This isn't about me

Or maybe it is 

And either the power will come back 

Or it won't 

We'll have to wait and see

Wanted Poster

 

A photograph of the iceberg that hit The Titanic,

Taken from a steamer surveying the sight the morning after

Brightness on black and gray, patterned chromatic

With an alleged streak in the center, red paint from the hull, blood from the machine, like a lipstick mark

The bitten-into pyramid, smaller than expected

A portcullis of negative space, a hole in the depth of the frame

Where the object met the wall

When you see the culprit peering out of the calm morning sea

Grab a camera and try not to break eye contact

Ruinenwert

 

A photograph of the Buckingham Watergate, a hundred and fifty yards away from the River Thames now, black and white and foggy reaching, perhaps during the blitz but that would be a romantic coincidence

One could easily imagine the structure, cowering in the corner of one of the great fires, edges black and seeming to hold the smoke, Atlaslike, over those fleeing into the brown water

 

The stone arch, that opens like a mouth to where the river was, before the city, diverted the stream

An entrance now into the empty air

Where they moved the world

And where you were before

Here is where they moved, the mapflow, all the numbers and lines in a great heaving

And what if every house, you’ve ever lived in, was haunted?

What would that mean, what pattern would you be able, to pick from the dusty sunbeams where your cats like to sleep?

Every time I walk by, a house that I used to live in, even if it’s been so long I barely remember

There’s that prickling up my arms like, so they say, a heart attack, like someone walked over, your funeral pyre, firewalked on the breathing ashes

Izzy Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry including most recently "Maps To The Vanishing" from Finishing Line Press. They live in Albuquerque, New Mexico.