#nick depascal

[headlightsforever]

Nick DePascal, “Complications (1)” from Schlag Magazine, Issue 3

[poetrysupportgroup]

The pigeons ignore us gently as we scream at one another in the parking lot of an upscale grocer. The cicadas are numbed by their own complaints, so numbed I won’t even try to describe the noise and tenor of their hum, but hum they do like a child humming with his fingers in his ears. Which, coincidentally, is what our son is doing. Red shopping carts crash together, and even the humans walking by do so dumbly, as if to say, no comment. As if two red-faced adults in tears is as common as the polluted air they breathe and keep reading about in Time and Newsweek, but are clueless as to what to do about it. Is this why we’re separating our recycling by glass, by plastic, by paper? Or why we’re buying organic produce at a place that smells like patchouli and port-o-potties? I ask you. Pigeons scoot, and finches hop, and cicadas shout and shed themselves into loose approximations of what we might have in a different time called heaven.

Poem of the day: December 15, 2014 Heaven // Nick DePascal

[therumpus]

Varyushka Cash crossed the red wasteland in darkness, under the radar, wires, and hexes that had been cast over the contaminated ground… she watched crystals and lambent minerals glimmering in the blood-red rocks between sparse shadowy cacti… she lay on her back staring into the black sky, analyzing the silver zodiac thrown out over this other forbidden space of the world. For minutes, she was paralyzed beneath its brittle, radioactive fur. The silence was profound.

From Bombshell by James Reich, reviewed at The Rumpus by Nick DePascal.