Two Poems 

Christopher Citro and Dustin Nightingale

There, There

Someone came up while you weren't looking and placed flower pots around you. Wait till you see them sprout. In a catalog I used to get when I was a kid, there was such a thing as a sympathy plant. It closed up when you touched it. And when you touched it again it fell asleep. See how good you are? You wanted to save up and send away but always forgot about it as soon as you closed the book. You wanted to have an effect on people. You wanted x-ray glasses that saw more than the pink puddles of flesh. But what else is there? When I grew a peyote button in a green house for 12 years, I couldn't get myself to eat it.  Instead I'd carry it to the top of the house on a windy night and sit with it in my lap, petting the side of the pot while the stars above absolutely would not stop spinning into dogs barking at their own images in still ponds. 

Eventually I Grew Up

I once was an apostle but no longer. I saw other visions. Books encrusted with crystals grown in humming vats of heavy water. On the inside we all look like rummage sales. I sold my dad's photo book for two dollars to a hipster who thought it was funny. We all hope that's not true. Even the person who bought it. He had a High Life in his hand and is now dead. Somewhere other dead are laughing at me naked in a baby tub with a bubble beard. I'm up a tree throwing nickels at the sun. Have you seen my mittens? Perhaps these are them. Yes, yes they are. It's wonderful when your first memory is a box in the back of a church that your mother tells you to get in and lie down. You are a strange creature, light. It's confusing the way the spring sun through the apple blossoms dapples absolutely everything.

Christopher Citro is the author of The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), and his poems appear or are forthcoming in Best New Poets 2014, Prairie Schooner, and The Greensboro Review.

Dustin Nightingale lives in West Hartford, Connecticut. His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as new ohio review, Margie, Cimarron Review, Portland Review, and decomP.