Roach
By: Jonathan Briggs
Nibbled on some Alba truffle with the epicures on the Upper Eastside
haven’t you? Look at you. Your ancestors
snatched morsels of sausage off Lincoln’s beard
decorated the DOI before the Founding Fathers with your peppery feces
played loot the natives with the Separatists in P-Town.
And you
you spine-legged Kafkacreature.
You!
More American than I!
More Earthly than I!
More earthy than I!
You
meet your end
melting and drowning
in a pan
of bacon grease.
Firefly
By: Jonathan Briggs
my eyes didn’t need to adjust to the night because it was hardly dark more gray and as I saw you hovering under the silhouette of the rotting pear tree and although as I said it wasn’t dark could still only see you blinking in the same spot tried to understand you but couldn’t could only attribute my thoughts to your position and thought this firefly is communicating with me or thought maybe you thought that I was with you with my cigarette covered by my hand to protect it from the invisible drizzle but that was all bullshit we weren’t communicating but I was still certain that there must have been some reason I was there and you under that corpse pear tree blur must have had your reasons for not moving just flashing flashing flashing and I thought I was crying but it was just the rain which made me feel like a damned fool so I wiped my boots on the mat and went back inside and wrote you a poem
Ant
By: Jonathan Briggs
I watched an Ant struggling
to pull a piece of silverfish through
a gap in the hardwood.
The segment of the dead
insect was too big
for the passage.
He entered from the top first, pulling
it lengthwise, then width,
sideways, forward.
I thought
I was this ant.
Casey’s apartment: 2007.
No matter how hard
we tried
to get his couch through the front door,
we failed.
Break the legs,
I suggested.
His mother had bought it for him. She died.
He wouldn’t.
I went home that night.
We didn’t get the couch through the threshold.
The ant
had disappeared.
I don’t know if he ever got the silverfish through
the gap in the hardwood or
if I stepped on him in careless thought.
Three days after I went
back and sat on Casey’s couch,
legs intact.
I never asked him how he got it there.