Three Poems by Anthony Immergluck

I live in half a house.

The foundation was laid
in the late eighties
and the rest was never finished.

Lattices of lumber
with Tyvek siding;
wedges of various synthetics.

Small intestine pipework,
endocrine heating vents;

nervous system haywire sparks
chirping and fraying at night.

I shower underneath
the incessant leak
of wheezing aluminum bellows.

I sleep on a mattress
of exposed rubber-brass springs

and wake each morning with new
surgeries embedded in my back.

Loose screws manage
through moccasin and foot.

Stalagmites of sawdust
and asbestos residue.

A decapitated spinal staircase.

I live in half –

Skate-rats and meth-heads
commingle in my foyer.

Double-daring preteens,
indigent possums.

The neighbors have seen
my every shameful angle

and the termites want me gone.
– a house.

Folks often ask me
what I do when it rains.

But what can I say?

I get wet.

Sci-Fi
– After Tracy K. Smith

In the T-minus weeks before my birthday,
I make frequent speculations on the nature
of Star Trek Barware and whether or not
I’d ever be able to afford such a thing.

I finger the narrowing wormholes in my face.
They are missing their old insignias – infected
alloys hammered into dumbbells, partial rings.
They used to grant me passage into mirror worlds.

I’m hoping to open a Pandora’s box of temporal
paradoxes – Pol Pot and Stalin trampled as infants.
Maybe I’ll hide behind the bushes at my senior prom
and whisper sweet nothings on my younger self’s behalf.

I wish you could still smoke on spaceships.

And I perform little Turing Tests on myself all day
to determine the extent of my artificiality.
There are uncanny new valleys in the space
between the mirror and my face. I bank […]

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Samsara

The Buddha was a problem child
just like me.

Some say on laundry days
you can still hear his ghost
humming over the spin cycles:

“You do know, Mama,
that I plan on getting
these dirty all over again?”

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Anthony Immergluck is a writer, critic, musician, and publishing professional with an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from NYU-Paris. Some of his recent work appears or is forthcoming in Nimrod International Journal, Sonora Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, World Nomads, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Anthony works as a traveling representative for W. W. Norton and as the Senior Marketing Associate for Tupelo Press. Originally from Chicago, he now lives and works out of Madison, Wisconsin.