“ASYLUM” AND OTHER POEMS
Image licensed via Adobe Stock. Edited.
Michael Autrey is the winner of the 2025 River Styx Prize in Poetry, judged by Dg Okpik. A print version of these poems will appear in River Styx 109: Posthuman (March 2025).
Asylum
Mother, the shipwrecked
are here and there. But
do you really think they have come
this far just to steal your prize
piece of Czech pottery,
the creamer with moose antlers?
Cream pours from its mouth
in a thread-fine stream. Unless it’s gone
to junket. To kill time
I cross town, to New Seasons,
for the samples: a wax-
coated demitasse of fairtrade coffee,
a bamboo spatula of salsa, compote or jam.
Delinquent among ziggurats
of organic produce, resealable envelopes
of muesli, sachets of tea
each to its own
transparent plastic freshness sleeve—
I understand PPE
is the new amber, fry living and dying
in the thumbs of latex gloves.
Back home, you sugar your coffee,
the cream for me,
who has not taken it in years.
Spoon tinkling the bell
of your china cup, you take
up your grievance: Your brother . . ..
Even when in the room,
he, who raised twins, and then
from you, estranged them,
is more real to you than I am.
Once a year, before Christmas,
they show up to knead
and knot the Vanutchka.
You brush the braids with egg yolk,
they sit texting in a glow
you wish you could bring to light
upon their faces.
And then they go back out in-
to what
you still
refer to as the world.
__
Surveilled by that loitering munition,
the moon, four—no:
five— wade a trickle in the Rio
Grande’s wide sandy bed something
happens when they arrive
on this side that to me
never happens.
I’ve been here since what
all began.
On a phone
they show me the clip, of “four—no:
five” crossing, they might be
walking in the coyote’s tracks
they track bits of shadow
onto the bank or
are those footprints they get smaller
at this distance they might be punct-
uation in search of ceasefire, closure.
What’s he got on his head?
A bundle.
Sneakers by the laces slung around his—her—neck—
Jailbait—Print that?
No—no I’ve had it
up to here, another unwelcoming asylum.
__
At this frontier,
unlike Riyadh, Asunción, somewhere
outside Tucson, no one
waves a machine gun
in my general direction,
or walks into the high-beams, pistol
pointed at the windshield
of my rental;
no sweating uniform says:
I don’t believe you. Or:
you’re not ill, you can’t be—
that was at Schiphol—
the agent
acting on behalf of these
stomping
grounds.
__
Little courtesies disguise
quite ordinary fears,
when there isn’t time
to cross the street,
downcast looks pacify:
a little blindness, a little deafness,
a little tasteless, a little
shiftless, always restless—
every day, in every situation,
titrating how much space
to occupy. Once, from the divot
of the mattress, like a garment
of fine fabric fresh from the dryer,
I emerged shrunken, wrinkled.
(One dryer cycle equal to one dog year.)
I repaired to New Seasons, to aisles
of long-lived packaging
for exotic perishables;
and on the cans, mouthwatering
pictures that relate to the cans’ contents
as trafficker to victim.
Label and can can be
recycled. And of you, Mother,
I am always thinking.
We’ll argue, your sons,
then divvy up your ashes: some
for the wind some to dust
the trunk of an old-growth Douglas fir
some to polish agates
at South Beach and Lincoln City
some to muffle sea-
shells that sound too alive,
and one to go on,
as courtesy requires.
__
I refuse camera, candle, firearm,
X-handle, prefer lying to relatives
than to strangers, but let them
click and swipe through a labyrinth
of pages to what they believe
is my profile, profiling.
At the ford, high water,
they cross as if in deep snow,
their feet in the same water-
holes as those that passed before.
This one of several rivers that,
no matter when, no matter
what, one steps in a river
that’s already been stepped in,
ever the same river, the very same
On a Wing and a Prayer
Ever seen a mantis catch and eat a monarch?
Disposes of the wings like the paper
From branzino al cartoccio. After a rare
Downpour, caterpillars of the striped hawk
Moth invade the Sinai, defoliate a variety
Of desert plants, while the moths loot
Nectar from Iphiona. Lazarus has died
Again. Pulled the horizon up to his chin.
A white-lined sphinx, long-distance migrant,
Arrives, to snorkel in the morning glories.
Was a time when you could set your watch
By the starlings’ return to their roost
On the rust-red bridge. Lazarus, woozy,
Seeks the key to Jerusalem
By the blaze of a roman candle.
Must be prayer that keeps the mantis
From being poisoned. Monarchs almost
Extinct, not that you’d notice. Once,
In their billions, they blotted out the sun,
Migrating south over Boston.
Lazarus on life-support.
To harvest his organs.
Sacrificial Animals
After a shower, three vultures
hang themselves out to dry.
You get the joke: they’re not
flashing anybody, but asking
for a hug, solace. Nude heads
bare—they keep their vows
of silence. Centuries
of omertà and necessary disposal:
the bodies not buried but eaten.
They would have made a meal
of that road-kill opossum
before Taft’s Fountain
of Time: uterus cooked-lobster
red, hotdog-smooth. My omphalos.
Michael Autrey is an essayist and a poet. His first collection, Our Fear, was published by The Cultural Society in 2013. Poems have appeared in Aurochs, Bloodroot Literary Magazine, EcoTheo Review, Literary Imagination, and Your Echo Comes Back in Greek: a Festschrift for Rosanna Warren; essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Asymptote, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Chicago Review, Essays in Criticism, The Hopkins Review, Literary Matters, Raritan, and The Threepenny Review.