Flowchart
I can’t believe
I’m still alive
at times. Good grief,
I think, that ache
in my back
nearly broke
me. My left eye
can hardly see
the lepidopteran ‘z’
on the optometrist's
wall. Speech lists
in my mouth. Now it's
my shoulder, now
the underglow
of a migraine. I'm a flow-
chart of maladies
these days.
As I stand on the dais
of my late forties
I can’t see the trees
for the forest. Oh, please,
my daughter blurts,
your melodrama hurts
my hair. Dark arts
of adolescence
beckon, stance
switchblade. So when's
the funeral?
In the squall
of self-consciousness, all
is joke, aside, piquant
observation, lament.
I live rent-
free in your head,
she once said —
and will till I’m dead.
Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate (Ghost City Press, 2023), Still Life with City (Pski’s Porch, 2022) and Unburial (Kelsay, 2019). His poems and translations appear in Bad Lilies, Palette, Rattle and many other journals and anthologies. His work has been nominated for both the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. His translation Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell’Arco will be published by World Poetry Books in 2024. Currently a reader for Baltimore Review, he lives in Italy.
Pulsebeat Poetry Journal 