Victor Infante is the author of City of Insomnia, a poetry collection from Write Bloody Publishing, and his poems and stories have been published in numerous periodicals, including Pearl, Chiron Review, The Nervous Breakdown, Spillway, Word Riot and Dark Horizons. He founded The November 3rd Club, an online literary journal of political writing, and will shortly be launching a new online project, Radius: Poetry From the Center to the Edge. He lives and writes with his wife and pet ferret in a triple-decker apartment in Worcester, Mass., and has serious opinions about reality TV cooking competitions.

Five Poems (March 20, 2011. Issue 26. The SLAM & FLASH Issue!)

300,000 Kilometers Per Second

1.

It’s been a frogless summer
and the ponds are running dry
what water’s left
sits stagnant, untouchable
beneath the swirl of mosquitoes
so thick that they’ve become the air.

Stop, and the air will drain
the blood from you.
Stop, and bleed beneath
a fluttering of pins and wings.

Constant movement
will erode the knees,
but lack of it,
will cause the heart
to still, will cause
the blood to pump
more slowly.

This ocean beneath our skin
can storm into a hurricane
and lash against our fragile ribs
or stagnate like a frogless pond,
breeding tiny nightmares.

2.

When I was a runner,
before the knee gave out,
I could not recall the time
between the starting gun
and the finish line.

3.

This is the way your fingers
grasp neutrinos,
like there were charge enough
to shock you,
like time was something you
could grasp.
300,000 kilometers per second,
forward so fast you saw skin
leather around you, watched
the teeth fall out of neglected mouths.

This was only a moment, when your eyes
became electric light and you ignored
the aching of revolting joints –
no loneliness of the Marathon,
this sprint lasts for years, agony small
while muscles pull you forward
and you are transformed
to something other than matter,
while those around
you sit still and age.

Soccer at Nuremberg
(Iran vs. Mexico, World Cup, 11 June 2006)

You run this clock patiently –
Battered-torso ricochet, head injuries;
An ocean of sweat
where everybody drowns. 

Defy gravity, but don’t use your hands.
We’re all­ hogtied here: 

Each kick is a prayer toward Mecca
   coyotes with disreputable trucks
   enriched uranium 
   fistfuls of prescription drugs
   Guantanamo suicides
   less than minimum wage 
   a suicide bomb
   narcocorridos and unregistered guns.

The sound byte culture scratches its head,
the home run, the slam dunk:
meaningless as the stones that house the game,
though those, too, still whisper 

Although My Tongue Has Forked No Lightning

I cannot reconcile this pantomime of ghosts:

the way yesterday’s bag-of-bones punk sneers
in his knock-off leather jacket, Marlboro
dangling from dry lips; teenage knuckles cracked
where bone juts from broken skin;

the way the quiet-as-a-desert child
clutches comics in the dark, words
percolating behind his lips, absently
reaching for his dead father’s hand;

the way the actor spills his self
into cheap beer cans, until he is empty,
curls fetal on his bed, unresponsive
to the woman whose hand is on his shoulder.

the way the thin-breathed poet recalls
twenty-year old phone numbers of crushes
forgets last names of girls he’s fucked;

the way the whisky speaks snake venom
the serious lit major pretends isn’t there,

the way the sake becomes a proposition,
the way the cigarette becomes a prayer.

the phantom cast lingers off stage right
shuffles their feet, heckles the performance
disapproves of the choreography
clamors for cues
I’m reluctant to give.

Paris
(for Morris Stegosaurus)

I remember lights, the smell of coffee,
the brisk spring air, the summer not quite gone;
The Turkish boy and tie-dye clad hippie
who found me asleep at the train station,
huddled in my trench coat, travel sick and wan,
the girl’s name slipping from my memory,
lips still branded with her kiss, emotion
frozen, clinging to my beard; They gave me
small mercies: red wine, chunks of bread and brie –
the solaces we fit inside our mouths.
My language was highways, astrology
of train schedules, compasses pointing south –
and here was stillness, amid grinding gears,
amid the clockwork glide of stars and spheres.

Philophobia

We never spoke
of button-fly jeans and cinema,
barely tasted pomegranates,
the lies we told each other
in the interrogation
of sinew and synapse –

What shuddered off
the pit-roasted bone of us;
what searchlights flashed
against the heart-attack sky

as our hearts became
Persephone vanishing
into rusting leaves,
and the advent of snow,

as the silence
filled our lungs
like God.