Poetry – Issue 14 | February 2012
Goya
by Trent Nutting
Amidst the museum’s tomb
and mineral-penny smell
of stone, we unstilled
stagnant air with fluttered
maps and beelined to Goya,
whose dark cartoon
nightmares roiled with egg-
white eyes, gnashing teeth,
a father stormed by madness.
Beside her in the garret bed,
beneath the eaves like pigeons,
I counted the slow measured
breaths of her sleep,
knew our nights were numbered.
Through the skylight, city-lit
night clouds raced yellow.
Goya’s final isolation,
silence, visited like fog
and sat heavy on my chest.
In the morning I blurted
an end to love, spent the day
alone with Goya, tears
disappearing from my shirt-
sleeve in the sack-dry cool.
Saturn’s stick-legs, his frizzled
hair, and the innocent’s blood
sung to all we devour
for the sake of the beautiful.
About the author
Trent Nutting has been to Brazil, Utah, Florida, and all the pretend places his children’s books take him. He writes at a three-by-two kitchen table during the dark pre-dawn hours, before his daughters wake up. Some work, though, has seen the light of day. Poems have appeared in Comstock Review, Connecticut River Review, Linebreak, Miracle Monacle, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
Read our current issue, Issue 14 | February 2012:
Poetry
Berlin by Sy Margaret Baldwin
Two Poems by Sean Edgley
After Your Funeral I Set Out to Find You in Different Time Zones by Jennifer Faylor
Painter by Ricky Garni
Other Than by Dana Guthrie Martin
Two poems by Timothy Kercher
Five Views of Guanajuato: A Mythology by Athena Kildegaard
Two poems by Mary Kovaleski Byrnes
Goya by Trent Nutting
The Changing of the Flowers by Jennifer Saunders
Two poems by Ken Turner
Postcard prose
Buttons by Jennifer Faylor
The Enemy Tree by Kirby Wright
Escape on the Canal by Addie Zierman
