Max Cavitch, Leinwand: Wien 92, 2025 (Artist Instagram)
Digital photograph
Courtesy of the artist
Sometimes, nostalgic,
you open the curiosity cabinet
in your chest to take invent-
ory: inside where diacritical marks
of dragonflies still fly, swooping around your rib cage,
braking for bones, and chalk-drawn
stars spangle your mother, alive, forever
on the faulty film of your brain now.
Inside’s stuffed with an over-sized
pickle jar with your heart on display,
your heart that absorbed too soon
the laundry load list of being
loved; the little drink of water you said
you needed before bed, fraud that you are,
your glass mixed with confetti
and contaminated groundwater
pooling around the edges;
the joy that crawls out
on occasion, sunning herself when
you are making or unmaking
metaphor or when the lines
finally jibe together, like finding
a span of dry land far
from the Central Fly-
way of your fretting brain.
Yes, I mean the things in the curiosity cabinet
of your chest that you try to hide,
that poetry smuggles out on a pigeon
through the little cracks and peepholes
when you’re writing something else.