Brandon Amico: You Rise Like Smoke

Ode to the Charging Cable

Persistent whisperer, beginning

of many ends & end

of the diaphanous trek of electricity

through wave & turbine,

fiber & ground & up

through the home’s flooring;

yarn-spinner, enabler, life-

preserver in the ocean of codified air

we’re apt to drown in; omni-

lingual snake threaded through

bedframe up to my nightstand,

holding steady as if content

to sleep for once, but no—

satellite’s floodgate, pipe with no end

you dance within the binary,

the on-off, you eke

motion into the dormant & bray

into the piled minds of AI,

all coiled, conductive, rope

& all the good or evil

one could do with a rope; I

am tethered to the idea of you,

of proximity akin to shelter

or food, & you feed,

blue-lit worm of entropy, mouth

wide, pins of teeth—that’s not

fair, parasite is off by direction,

maybe you’re a monochrome

Robin Hood, catalyst

& balancer, lightning in need

of no rod, where phone lines

don’t grow in the dirt you prosper,

flower & spark in the night,

bioluminesce the faces peering

down, taking you in, from the canteens

of portable batteries

you rise like smoke

decoding a message from beyond—

a loved one’s name flashing

on my phone, dead four years, now

calling,

calling,

calling once more.

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Brandon Amico is a writer whose debut collection of poems, DISAPPEARING, INC., is forthcoming in March 2019 from Gold Wake Press. He is the recipient of a North Carolina Arts Council Regional Artist Grant and the Hoepfner Literary Award for poetry, awarded by Southern Humanities Review. His poetry can be found now or soon in journals including The Awl, The Adroit Journal, Blackbird, Booth, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, Diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Hunger Mountain, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, Sixth Finch, Slice, Waxwing, and Verse Daily, and his reviews have been featured by 32 Poems, AGNI Online, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, The Rumpus, and Southern Humanities Review.