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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

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