‘Lifeboat’, ‘Marks’, ‘Oxide’, ‘Lakeshore Drive’ & ‘Ars Poetica’

Edward Michael Supranowicz is the grandson of Irish and Russian/Ukrainian immigrants. He grew up on a small farm in Appalachia. He has a grad background in painting and printmaking. Some of his artwork has recently or will soon appear in Fish Food, Streetlight, Another Chicago Magazine, Door Is A Jar, The Phoenix, and The Harvard Advocate. Edward is also a published poet.

Lifeboat 

I carry the fragments of who I have been in my pockets as brittle, thin tokens, rolling from my fingers and twisting my fate as they spill out onto the floor.

My chest groans like seasick iron as I talk and these words flood out our hull. We are drowning, and I am tearing through these papered walls, letting the brine in.

Your lifeboat has no room for me; it is contoured to your body and would capsize under more than one hundred and fifty pounds of combined complication.

Let me atone at the bottom of the sea– for the luggage I’ve brought, that will bob along beside you;

for tugging my leaded arms up the gangway; for daring to be something other than breathless.

Marks 

When I see finger 

lakes on the map, 

I see great glacial 

stretch marks. 

Upstate is beautiful this time of year. 

The rolling hills 

of our stomachs 

welcome these 

honeyed branches 

and vixen dens. 

Stale leaves 

cascade to the 

water below. 

Swim in those 

translucent pools 

of mylar, stratified across my thighs. 

Bathe in the moonlight as it catches upon 

this thin skin.

Oxide 

Magnesium red oblong inch, 

follow this path after your sisters– one great family tree of vitamins and analgesia 

that claw up 

and down my 

throat. Don’t 

stop until you’ve bricked over each open window, so 

no air whistles past my ears. There’s no time to decide between control and constrain 

before you pull my grinding teeth together and 

leave only 

ash behind.

Lakeshore Drive 

Only the groaning wind 

floats across each lane, humming and soaking in the stillness– stillness, in which there is 

a restless tug of the world, 

the hollow footsteps of glaciers where teenagers spin out 

and snowbanks respond 

to the moon. The ice’s 

stoic gaze hides the churning, sweeping waltzes of black 

water below. Turbines blink red from across the border, but 

the world has stopped, 

bolted in place in this thick darkness. Brimming on the horizon 

is something that looks like dawn.

Ars Poetica 

Write– for your brother, your mailman, your neighbor’s one-eyed dog, the pothole at the end of your driveway, the chestnut stump in your backyard; 

for the friends you haven’t met yet, the moments not yet remembered; 

for little girls with big thighs and bigger feelings, wearing discount-aisle women’s large on the playground; 

for both nothing and everything, watching as they hold hands and blush; 

for test tube babies, lavender soap, fresh snow, iced tea, the taste of a vernal dawn; for your coy reflection; 

for the grown child still begging for love like a dog / begging for love like it was air; for every language you don’t speak; 

for pleasure, for privilege, for obligation– grasp for words like a tree reaches for sunlight, feel its water rush through your gills; 

for yesterday, today, and tomorrow– write.

A. J. Frantz is from Detroit and currently studies urban planning at Oberlin College. Her work has appeared in Folio, Meniscus, Prime Number Magazine, ellipsis, and elsewhere.