Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal Poem

Arsenic Lobster poetry journal	Final Issue 2018
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SHARED WITHOUT THE SOUND A TOUCH MAKES
Rob Cook

The violet you found
on your bed still
dying there—

It cries the way a stone cries.

It says you exist only as a fear
of time passing.

Rain scratching through the walls
during sleep, when you have no name.

*

“I want you to forgive the leaves
that fall from the pain
of their bodies gone missing,” a man said
to a woman shattered
to nothing but cigarettes on the sidewalk.

It took the dust pan and broom
three hours to appear
with a custodian.

The life span of a darkly-written
violet abandoning
its last petal,

stained over a hole in the universe.

*

Inside the window:
first spring night,
a man rowing minnows
to the deepest part of the lake,

and beyond the window,
rain falling
in the days of Shakespeare,

shared without
the sound a touch makes

between the roses unable to sleep in the hard fog of the space wall.

About Rob Cook

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