Federico in Prospect Park

// Teresa Tulipano

Our buzzing throats
full from a green bonfire
in the phosphorescent snow

We are escaping the painful corners
of the city’s obscene terraces
filled with tender girls
their dreamy skeletons
choking on a furious bread
of abandoned rust
and bloody foam from headless fish

Framed in their precise windows
under the crazed harvest
of a freshly threshed moon
these ones wear their lonely stickpins:
     – a scratched brass dog
     – a curved bee’s head
     – a pigeon-pecked apple
Chasing an idiotic and beautiful stone

Sifting through broken ashes
for a suicidal cog
fashioned of Japanese nickel
that sprung far
from the bristling trunks
of desperate kings
burning all traces of a celestial shame