Paul Ilechko

Paul Ilechko is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Pain Sections (Alien Buddha Press). His work has appeared in a variety of journals, including Juxtaprose, Rogue Agent, Cathexis Northwest Press, Thin Air Magazine and Pithead Chapel. He lives with his partner in Lambertville, NJ.

More Godlike

The seaweed stinks of whisky
in these parts she said a glinting

ulceration where the sunlight glances
from the waves a silver memory

of everything you ever cherished of
everything you left behind we’re off

the map she said you’ll never make it
home again imagine yourself she said

as an arrow released from a bow that arcs
its way over half the world only to find

its tip embedded in your spine such
is the life of the pioneer the clouds

above this place she said are the color
of war the color of the horse that spits

in your face as you try yet again to express
yourself as more than a collection of basic

essentials we are all gods she said but
some of us are more godlike than others.

The Expectation of Birds in the Rain

Rain and the April afternoon burns
through my knuckles into soft gray elemental my ruined
fist that fails to grip my eyes the color of daybreak
losing my shape as the year progresses
into wilderness

there is language and there is beyond language
there is the felt only in blood the impossible to dream
there where the inheritance of ghost blossoms and antique
glassware cracks slowly into splinters of wildfire

regret is the way the rain drips
from the corner of a slanted roof the way that moss
grows only on a certain side of a tree the way we swam
though tangled skeins of bedding too soaked
to ever leave our room

there is language and there is beyond language
there is a half assembled bricolage a braiding of leather
of magnolia leaves there is the creased and broken skin
that once caressed that once spilled elastic from magnetism

birds swarm through rain swimming with ease
beyond the keratin dream of hollow bone my bones
singing in time to the beat of their wings.

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