In the end we made a pillow for our headsfrom broken brick and twisted rebar.We huddled together in the waning sunlightand pulled a blanket of ash up to our chins.We nestled close, squeezed out all air between us,and even then, wound like a ball of snakes,we felt our warmth begin to drain. In the shadowsof reeling indignant desert drones,we felt the molten rock embrace our feet.Cradled now, we sleep the sleep of stones.Maybe in twenty centuries you’ll find us here,another fetal xenolith waiting to be reborn.
Stony Sleep
Dan Albergotti
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“Stony Sleep” from Candy: by Dan Albergotti.
Published by LSU Press on July 3, 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Dan Albergotti.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Dan Albergotti’s Candy is a book steeped in sound and silence. Sound in the form of song, of chaotic cacophony, and of the drone (sometimes natural, sometimes manufactured) that creates the ambient soundtrack of history and the seemingly apocalyptic present. Silence in the sense both of the void’s innate quietude and of the failure to speak—of people either dumbstruck or in denial, not speaking because they cannot or will not. Throughout this collection, these sounds and intermittent silences provide the rhythm for poems that question the nature of truth and myth, and that restlessly search for meaning in a reticent universe, ultimately unwilling to take no for an answer as they strive to find an ever-elusive yes.
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