If You Open the Vault, There Better Be Something Inside
Anthony Borruso
From Wiki rabbit hole to excavating
Snapchats from the Titanic’s wreckage
and stacking careful decades like Anna
Kendrick just to collapse them with
the swiftness of a viral dance craze,
clumsy on love, I knock into an image:
Phillip Sidney as an undergrad
flashing his fake at the tattooed face
of a bouncer. Poor versifier, entering
a flashing cave of bodies, bodies, bodies,
all victims of helicopter and free-range
parents, idealized romantic traditions
of clever deception and anadiplosis in
DMs. DMs where, in the style of Vana
White, touch turns to language and language
leads back to touch. Clickbait muses
and fruitful showers spamming my inbox
in iambs, I ask, who can die young
in an atmosphere like this? Who could
pine for star-crossed semantics or even
bother waking up Bourbon Street slurring
Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!
Now everyone’s moving to Denver. The moon
warns with its sly smile: Better not.
Because the love poem, if nothing else, has shown
us that recoil’s a killer. It’s cold and the spectacle
of self is getting old. I’ve barely the strength
to retweet Dante or copy/paste a lover’s face.
And here comes Pandora carrying
a cardboard Colorado for the USPS.
She’s no Geraldo making outlandish claims
about what’s inside. A working stiff,
she merely gets it where it’s going.
I don’t blame her. It’s HelloFresh
that’s sapped the world of mystery. Chicken
paprika in six simple steps, who’s got time
to write a sonnet from scratch?
About the writer
Anthony Borruso is pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Florida State University, where he is a Poetry Editor for Southeast Review and co-host of the Jerome Stern Reading Series. He has been a Pushcart Prize nominee and was selected as a finalist for Beloit Poetry Journal's Adrienne Rich Award by Natasha Trethewey. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Spillway, The Journal, THRUSH, Gulf Coast, CutBank, Frontier, and elsewhere.