Carlin Corsino

I Come Home Late From 
            the Factory

The mountain is never late,
nor browning
the still blue of its mornings
with bourbon.
Day workers,
       the mountains,
ending their labors as our eyes,
who daily witness the knurled sky
sawed open, drift
to their dreams
of the summit.

Swing shift,
         the waves.
The moon
                    pulling
          them to-and-fro
in their salty industry,
yet always standing
to embrace the young
breakers,
rolling home
from the shore.

I see it all
in the dawn. The Earth
washing
          away. The mountain.
The waves. My work
boots, muddying
the corner in this waking
light.

Once
I stood close
to touch the mountain
in daylight, but now my
dreamers
collect the dust
from my soles as I
sleep.

Graduation Day

 On a cool, early summer evening, two black teens
aged 17 and 18 are shot in their chests with
9mm handgun rounds during gangland violence at their
graduation party.

Tell me a story, son,
your rib maw
splayed wide
on sterile alabaster
to let your open heart speak.

Smoke escapes,
summa cum laude
spilling out
onto the history
books of pavement.

Tell me when
cinder and flash
passed through the degrees
of separation between black
hats thrown skyward

and a mother’s
last tear
falling
in emergency
parking.

Tell me the joke again –
how many dead
black boys does it take
to unscrew
this country?

Or one about
two kids walking
into a party and leaving
before they could be
nothing else.

 

Carlin Corsino is an emergency department worker and soon to be Army Veteran. He grew up in Appalachia. All these experiences color his poems and writing. His most recent work is forthcoming in Trailer Park Quarterly, Bending Genres, and the Front Porch Review.