Two Poems

“Snare” by Aaron Lelito

Poem for the God of Studio Apartments

This morning when I wake from a dream in which I am a piece of chewed amber walking a tightrope between a Dollar General and emptiness, I imagine that the inside of my heart is a flat, eggshell white--sterile, warm only in bad lighting. I imagine, as I pour water into a bottle cap for the boxelder bug overwintering in my apartment, what it would be like to measure my loneliness in ​ounces​, meaning, improbably, snow leopards​, because I want something about me to be rare and dangerous and beautiful, even my lack. I have named the boxelder bug ​Montgomery after a man in a group home I worked in briefly, who lived his first four decades wordlessly, who, tired of swallowing his own silence, looked me square in the face the day before his forty-first birthday and said ​hamburger​. To think, the shape of a miracle is a quarter-pound of red meat. Before my favorite high school teacher died slowly of cancer, bleeding internally for five years so that, desperately anemic, she came to dream of devouring the warm, raw flesh of the firmly still-living, she had our class draw the impossible thing we wanted most. I drew a house. It was blue with shutters, and inside, I pictured large, spare rooms, people sitting companionably, drinking tea. Now, as my neighbor screams again at his skinny dog, or else at his bovine, saucer-eyed wife, I think of adjectives for Montgomery the boxelder bug, who over the course of twelve minutes, has ascended from the bottom of the floor lamp to its crown of soft, iridescent light. I try out ​valiant,​ ​inquisitive​, ​knightly​, scour the internet for others. Sidetracked by an article called “8 Nicer Ways to Say Stupid,” I linger on ​Anserine​, from the Latin ​anser​, meaning ​goose​. Think how perfect a name for the daughter I might have had in the apocrypha of my life when a man smelling of the dankest pot heard me warbling a lullaby to the stale air of a Jimmy John’s in Cleveland, Ohio. Offered to jack off into a cup if I wanted. Said, ​I’m lonely, too.


American Venus

Audrey Munson, 1891-1996, posed for dozens of statues, over fifteen of which can still be found in New York City alone. In 1931, Munson was committed to an insane asylum, and remained institutionalized until her death at 104.

Sleepless, my body catacombs the city,
also sleepless.

Imagine walking down an avenue to find,
not quite hidden by bushes,
your legs,
your torso.

From everywhere,
my face peers at me shyly.
It wants to be as simple as a leaf.

Sometimes, if I look closely,
I see those statues flinch.

It sounds mad, I know,
but sometimes I hear those statues
howling to each other
like dogs carrying news,
carrying warnings.

Audrey Gradzewicz was born in Buffalo, NY. Her poems appear in Mid-American Review, Muzzle, Smartish Pace,The Puritan, and Ninth Letter.