Barry Blitstein

Creation Myth

It was green light made the grass with all the other spectral membership tasking off with this and that: Orange, oranges; all the yellows, pee, peas; blues, berries, testicles
on icy mornings; soon the colors fogged and fuzzed to seas and skies, skins and
lips, shoes and shits, until the grays with vacant reminiscences of color
dusked the objects in your eyes and mine and changed my
memories of what had been and then the grays were
gone, as you and I remade the tastes and tiny
stenches, textures and breaths of every
particle of
night.

Last Weekend in the Apples

Sweet and not,
We, crushing, slithering, writhing,
Baskets overthrown,
Sharp wicker ends bloody.
Incomplete within, beneath
Mingled apple slither, dust, blood, cores, semen
Fecundity dirt-black, stench-fragrant.

Bodies plunging deep,
Breath choked by fecal dust of
deities turned to orchard.
We, dissatisfied with perfection
Misdirected by false emptiness,
Legs owning our thoughts;
Abducted, seduced, enslaved by sky,
Senses stuffed with distance:
Apples fermenting, dissolved with and by,
Ecstatic foam leaching past our yearning,
Food and poison for that terrible, perfect ancient thing.

(Published 2013 by NewTown Writers Press, Off the Rocks, Volume 17)
copyright 2013

in this ineffable moment

in this ineffable moment some
knot neither substantial nor explicable binds
me to a longing
an
unfulfilled aspiration
an
aspiration which may be unrealizable
it
lives disguised by dark
ness
giving the illusion
it
needs
only light to be revealed
but
darkness is an empty disguise
as light reveals only its own brightness
nothing more
neither
fulfils its promise its
obligation imposed by mere
language
failed mentor of that which is helpless to be known

Barry Blitstein holds an MFA from Brooklyn College. He follows the sculptor’s notion that form is alive within the substance for the sculptor to find. His work has been published by the New York Writers’ Coalition, in "Off The Rocks," "Hartskill Review," “The Inflectionist Review,” “East Bay Review” and “Beechwood Review.”