Gregory Letellier

Against the Window Glass
 

This is the nature of fire. It wavers, flickers,

crisply golden. It cracks 
on a match-tip, and the boy waves it clean, 
to a memory, emitting a vanishing wisp, skyward, 
 
like the mill-smog of smokestacks, 
once floating over town, long before 
he learned that germs evolve 
into distended guts & awkward limbs. 
 
He wasn't always human. 
He knew this. 
 
**
 
Night like a slow panther, follows day.
emerges from the steppe. The boy wonders
how life without dirt would be. Life without 
land and smoke and rain, its percussive patter tapping
upon his window glass,
 
as he places his dirty hand flatly upon it, observing
drops,
 
snaking down in ghostly-lines,  
chased 
 
to his wrist, tiny swimming ancient 
streams, 
 
along the lines 
of his young hands, 
running 
 
to a murky pond, his palm, where once frogs 
burped and birds hiccupped. 
 
**
 
He makes eye contact with himself 
through glass. Earth, he thinks, 
you’re the vagabond, not me.

 

Gregory Letellier is student of Literature at Emmanuel College in Boston. He has poems published or forthcoming in Emerge Literary Journal, Linden Avenue Review, Poydras Review and Clutching at Straws.