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Michael Milligan has worked as a construction laborer, migrant fruit and grape picker, homestead farmer and graphic arts production manager. He is a survivor. He took his MFA in Creative Writing at Bennington College co-founded of Poetry Oasis Worcester and was privileged to be an editor with Diner. His poetry book reviews, fiction and poems have appeared in Agni, Diner, The New Orleans Review, The Valparaiso Review, Chaffin Journal, Blue Earth Review and others.
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Call Me Icarus
One might think the heat trauma
or the light strike would sweat
me awake nights but it’s the memory
of the noise that throws me over.
A whole life screeched through
in maybe a minute.
Everything felt, spoken,
and hidden.
Thundering the atmosphere,
booming past the speed of sound.
My kinetic contradictions
combusted, each to its rattling kernel.
Scattered along
the shoreline
here and there.
No one
can find
me
until
I am ready.
*****
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Trawling
there goes
The green unraveller,
His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose
Dylan Thomas
Me, I’m whoever. Reeling in my dimness.
The sea surface a splendored mirror
I fell into. Down, down, down.
Besieged in our ocean trenches
whoever we want to be depends on uncertainties.
On perspective.
Sirens called, it was a week ago now,
leaning wrong letters into wrong wind – I missed
that song— but who attends to recitations
by near strangers? Do you? I submerge my own wishes
far too deep even for rapture. Fishing lines above
drip with light. Better your sweet heart overcome
than lost in the drowned hall I walk
when memory begins its green unraveling.
*****
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Icarus Mourned
It was raining that day, the seventh straight.
Plucking a grape swelled from downpour, a concord split on the vine, you said
“the essential is only revealed with skin peeled back.” Clumsy fingers managed
to tear a wider dissection. “Here,” you said, “the interior of intention.”
Now that vine withers from drought. Locusts fly up. Sudden puppets with lacquered fans.
I wonder at the luminosity of my skin, at how your containment swelled toward bursting.
The end of time was gray autumn rain. I was there.
Clouds flow from horizon to horizon in waves, cut the moon
with feathered edges. Through gaps sky is the blue of angels. Birds. Sea.
I think of your fall. To fly is not human. I feel the beat of heart against my heart,
the taste of our breath, how you carried sky and sea inside you, how nothing satisfied.
After you drowned the coral reef interred your bones.
What you feel now, palming me like summer wind, I cannot say.
Drenched ghost, I am dry with question: what does this mean— water and air.
*****
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