Map Literary: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and Art
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    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art
Picture

Greg Glazner

 ​
Burning Man

1.
I swipe my blistered head    one eye on
thunderheads coming for the sun.
 
Not a breath without the smoke smell. Not one
rumbling without the trouble in it. 

Feelingly I reach my oak stick out. And by
wince or pull
                    by a nerveworks of fractures
I get what passes. A ghosted semi
rattles by    the pickup in a film of grime.
A half-mile off one high crow floats
                                                    a sedan
changing lanes below   all the chromes flashing— 
an ache like foil on a filled tooth.
 
In no time it arrives for me    a silver
Chrysler. I feel the heat of it idling
a door gleams open
                              and I know— 
smoke rolling out in the slant sun.

2.
Heat-blind I lean in. A woman’s voice. You can ride with me     if you don’t mind some smoke.
 
The seat’s plush. It’s cool and dim. I can just make out the cigarette      her manicured hand. Considering how I have to smell the smoke’s a godsend.
 
She says Your head looked like it was on fire    and I begin to see her     dark-complected      her hair straightened      red-streaked. 
 
I say I’m widening my mind. She looks me up and down    studies the oak stick at my side    her face gone weary     breathes out a scalding sound.
 
A man of your years she says    reaching back to the cooler for a water    should not be burning up out in the sun.
 
With all that smoke I knew for sure I say    and drink     grateful   ready for her messages. 
 
She shakes her head   mouths something. Sets her forward stare. Puts in ear buds and accelerates    smoke blowing out as we go.

3. 
When the head-throb’s gone I can 
hear a rumbling under the AC that’s 
all there is suspending us at seventy.
 
Just some silence would drop us 
to the rushing pavement    the driver’s
contempt seems absolute    and by 
 
no means am I true enough 
to be braving the wakened world 
again     peering out of my sockets 
 
like a fugitive through a slot. Not so 
long ago I was a boy who’d love
a thistle weed if it had a miller on it.
 
The storm’s green light and far-off 
flashes have reached the oaks
and pump jacks     you can feel
 
the pressure dropping    and it isn’t 
so much that you understand 
what’s coming     as that you’ve already 
 
known it to strip man and tree
to their skin      and leave them standing….

4.
In the dark now brother I have
you close    and what a frightful
witness squad we are   with no
 
legs down in the door well   no torso
to speak of    and all this storm-
bashed ruin     this abandonment 
 
of dogs to haunt us. You’d think
dialing in some radio might help— 
the driver in her ear buds 
 
never flinches—but it’s Christian    
Christian    country    Christian    
country    Christian    classic rock. 
 
So with used-up music going    rolling on
under a front that towers    flashing
and doesn’t rain    kinsman we’re worn
 
so bare the dark shows through. 
And a voice that half-passes for 
what we are    whispers Used to be. 
 
The mind’s-eye white of a sky-lit room     
the backs of her olive-soft legs    the high 
almost yodeled tones of hounds that 
 
aren’t here    howling    guilts and grievances    
harms floating with no body      just semblances 
and words     as speed propels us
 
eastward     suspended by the grace 
of a few feet over the blacktop    ceaselessly 
whispered to.  A lost home     a cellar— 
 
injury what are you    that you tell yourself 
relentlessly      as if against some
 
doubt you’re real? Kinsman     brother    
only you seem genuine    close enough 
I barely know your pulse from mine. Ruin     
what’s left of you but what you gave me— 
 
wince     shudder     dream? The disposition
of a shallow-nerved tooth    fine-tuned 
to the weather. Maybe it never 
 
comes to nothing after all. A flash     
our heads and shoulders    those suspended 
in the other lane    all up and down the road
 
shine manifestly    and are lost again 
even before the noise arrives    levitators 
all of us     thinking of our quick    bright 
 
confines     ignoring the massive 
shadow we’re dissolved in. No more. 
In the blackout I can sense how 
 
all this breathing feeds weather that keeps
funneling and coming for us    how all 
the driving is unsettling hills that weren’t 
 
quite finished anyway with being an ocean.
The lightless droning floats us     and yet this late
there’s so much sinking. How heavy 
 
can a body can get as the pull takes hold— 
brother are you with me? The undertow’s 
in earnest     and we’re going where it goes.

​5.
Hey Radio she says. Hey Burning Man    and I’m awake. We’re parked    a windshield full of hotel lights.
 
She says You’ll need a bed     watching me without blinking. My salty clothes    my red hands in my lap. My kinsman nowhere visible.

Not at my house she says. I have people to think about. Her bracelets shine    and her jogging suit. 
 
I open my door     all that light     and stand. Saying I think I know you    not to her outfit or skin    but to where she’s in behind her eyes.
 
She considers this   my clothes and oak stick    eventually my eyes. She takes her card from the dash and offers it    still considering. 
 
I slide it in a pocket    sense its messages coming through by touch     thank her for the ride     
 
and limp on into the lobby   where Amanda with the nametag    with chalk skin and drifting lipstick    types me in for the night    eying my branch familiarly 
 
mentioning her felon brother the water witcher    her husband studying the prophesies      doing time in Talladega     her nightly Ativan that’s like swallowing a miracle.
 
Upstairs     dry flashes at the window   her angled smile still with me if I blink     I rinse my shirt out     hang it on a lamp    
 
and listening to the far-off shuddering    I flip the lights off     let my mind go into all the darkness over Tulsa    and blank out on the clean bed on my back.

​
Copyright © April 2019 Greg Glazner

Greg Glazner's books of poetry are From the Iron Chair and Singularity, both published by W.W. Norton. His awards include The Walt Whitman Award, The Bess Hokin Award from Poetry, and an NEA Fellowship. His recent manuscript, Cellar Testament, won the 2018 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. He teaches at UC Davis and in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
​

published by
The Department of English
College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences
The William Paterson University of New Jersey
Copyright © 2012-2022 Map Literary
Map Literary

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  • About
    • Masthead
    • Submissions
    • Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award
    • NJ High School Writing Contest
    • In Print
    • Subscribe
    • Links
    • Internship Opportunity
    • WPU MFA
  • Poetry
    • Richard Ryal
    • Sherwood Anderson
    • Mark DeCarteret
    • Dennis Hinrichsen Poetry
    • Daniel Biegelson
    • Natan Last
    • Jim Daniels Poetry
    • Michael Chang
    • D E Steward
    • Benjamin Paloff Poetry
    • David Dodd Lee
    • Isabelle Doyle
    • Kathleen Heil
    • Leonard Kress
    • Lauren Tess
    • Cesca Janece Waterfield
    • Billy Cancel Poetry
    • Scott Minar
    • Greg Glazner
    • Bruce McRae
    • Maureen Thorson
  • Fiction
    • On Experimental Fiction
    • Mark Cassidy, "How I Met My Wife"
    • Emily Trachtenberg, "Plum"
    • Hector Donovan-Gonzalez
    • Christopher Linforth, "Zia"
    • Jenessa Abrams, "You Never Wish That Upon Anyone"
    • Eros Livieratos, "On Feeling"
    • Halsted M. Bernard, "Your Hands"
    • Justin Meckes, "The Gash"
    • Reb Livingston, from "Bombyonder"
    • Craig Foltz, "Without Stigma"
  • Nonfiction
    • Martha Wiseman, "Loose Ends"
    • Jan Jolly, "Through My Father's Glasses"
    • Kristina Moriconi, "Still Looking"
    • Wm. Anthony Connolly, "IGY"
    • Cal Freeman, "Loosestrife"
    • W.F. Lantry, "The Strange Beauty of the Unfamiliar"
    • Michael Roloff, "Accretion"
    • Andrew Sunshine, "John Hancock's John Hancock"
    • Diane Payne, "3 micro memoirs"
    • Luc Sante, "Flesh and Bone"
    • Isobel O'Hare, "Failure: A Love Letter"
    • Melissa Wiley, "Barbed Wire Fence"
    • Ashley Wilkinson, "fractional distillation"
  • Art