Maximilian Heinegg (3 poems)
Grace
For Jeff Buckley
I was a busboy swapping ashtrays when I heard
a soprano in the basement of the Fez, NYC,
climbing octaves like a valkyrie.
A singer myself, I traded my shift,
saying it was for second-floor tips—
when the audience emerged from the stairwell
like they’d seen the loveliest
ghost. I sat with Miracle Legion,
agreeing he was just a voice.
I left the city soon after, but caught the fault,
angling to the front of Tower Records,
bowing to Grace in its entirety.
After, he signed my Nietzsche. That young,
& knowing, he wrote, May you be luckier
in love. We lost the leaf, but we were.
The Way We Say We Drive
Defensively, we tell the children
our public lies. Any highway proves
middle fingers lust for a fling,
signal balls with ring & index. Trigger
petty outrage or longbow it, stranger
to stranger. Secret assholes, all auto-
crats, musclers, tailers, snap honkers,
swervers, off-parallel parkers, kings
of stymie, slow booth change grabbers,
left lane jerkers in the night’s zen
dazing me with high beams. Bleeding
my rage out when the rotary’s tourniquet
loosens, helpless in the commute’s triage,
where every urgency is privileged, trumps
patience. Caught between the flag tattooed
truck’s Don’t Tread & the charter laurelled
hybrid tailing us, we entirely fail to conceal
ourselves, rearing yellow-snubbers, banging
rights on denied reds. We don’t signal or wave
a pre-emptive hand for apology. Hypocrisy is
what you see first on the road: no cops around.
Future Butterfly
Spent the day, higher than high, fortunate transient
ripping through bags copped from papis
weaving beneath Alphabet awnings,
with fresh works from addicts scored at the clinics,
ascending parent-rented apartments with tonight’s friends
from the Sidewalk or Under Time, from the Bank
or the Fez or from Brownie’s, late teens returning
with cash from elevated cages, stripping their way
through Hunter & together, busboys & waiters &
barbacks, managers & bartenders’ pockets full
for now spilled into the effortless evening,
& no one overdosed until they cut it harder;
then pleasure turned poison, & the poorer
stayed with the hand, two wings rotting in
a sticky chrysalis the rich kids quit & flew.
Maximilian Heinegg 's poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. He was a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, December Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Cutthroat, Rougarou, Asheville Poetry Review, the Nazim Hikmet prize, and the Joe Bolton award from Twyckenham Notes. Recent work appears in Thrush, Nimrod, and Love's Executive Order. Additionally, he is a singer-songwriter and recording artist whose records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com