Tony Iantosca
SAXOPHONE
Some saxophones
are better than others.
If the belt of energy
tightens across or between
the heads you’ll hear
about it because everyone
starts talking. Look at the band aids
on their feet. The Jonathans
of Politics hog all the air.
Seagulls crowd the bus lane
to be out of the house
as city confusions sketch
the buildings, I know this block,
but not the next one,
the watery wind unbinding
the hunger people feel
when their benefits are canceled
or their teeth get pulled
before their time. The appointments
in the wind I feel on my face
as I miss them, make it up to you
not dinner but something else.
BIRTH HELMET
They want to get
the birth rate up. Lifestyles,
exponents of the bodies they
preserve, the landing
strip won’t have you,
try again. Take off the helmet.
Have another coke. The price hike
periphery folds a lung
you can ignore, close the poet’s
career prospects, more fun to circle
the block, narrate and lose the game
to fistfuls of objects
that run the empty innings
around parked cars. I didn’t know
all the dimensions of life until
I started hopping turnstiles
again and getting away with it
reading a chapter as the train doors
choke on sneakers, buses and students
outside the joys of theft
marking traffic’s periphery
for a loss of dimensions, get away
for a while, produce the future
one lifestyle at a time. Maybe a life of just
breathing isn’t where it’s at, though,
more to it than a salad, conjunctions
or croutons fissure or crumble
and you’ve got origami dollar bills
permission to recover your password
and every other linoleum prohibition
haunts like an ache
in the goddamn hand that never
seems to migrate meditations be damned.
OTHER FOOTBALL
Sincerity wears bracelet jewelry
and I smell fresh coats of paint
the wall sank into
night rhythms count degrees
and seeking scales by speech
to know mouths and truth
without confession’s
impulse and bone. Heard
the norms are in pain
but the specialists are out
of town for the month. Ears tune
to tidal passage, door to finger
to door new centuries
seem to occlude. If the future
normalizes or if the lemonade
ever arrives, if I pay a bill
I feel discipline and thus
that comfort, diner aprons
the worst sandwich you
can remember getting
stoned at dusk. Police
and shrubs are a roadside
the inert paint and the inert wall
the holes and opportunity
to slouch and shed some paint
the door to the sea or the pain.
Your policy is out of numbers
your debt is out of skin and the data
circulating to other
people’s football. The sea paints
of how we think of boats differently
depending on the numbers that ricochet
pulse and vein and who learned
to swim and let the numbers in.
The barricades, the bones,
driftwood, if I invoke the lines
of a story, if I thieve breath
and punctuation, it becomes mine
to distort and forgive
and revise things
so nobody else can.
Tony Iantosca is a writer, poet and educator who lives in Brooklyn and teaches at Kingsborough Community College (CUNY). He is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Crisis Inquiry (Ugly Duckling Presse 2023), To the Attic (Spuyten-Duyvil, 2020), and Shut up, Leaves (United Artists 2015).
