Two poems

Ryan Tracy

Nessun Dorma
 
   3 p.m.
 
About midway
I get annoyed with the day.
 
I hope for it to end
so I can fall asleep,
 
wake up again and begin the next one.
I start to plot what it will take
 
to get to bed,
how many Manhattans I will need to drink,
 
what show to stream
or if I should try to read a book
 
before blacking out.
It’s a delicate balance
 
to will the hours to pass and turn back
in a single breath.
 
Like playing chess or The Game of Life
with death.
 
​
   3 a.m.
 
Anxious thoughts jar
like an alarm clock without a snooze.
 
They drag me into a false morning
too early to brew coffee,
 
too late for writing.
Mark is dead asleep.
 
I go out to the living room,
watch TV on the couch and look at my phone.
 
I send naked pictures of myself to strangers
and receive naked pictures of strangers in kind.
 
My desire to watch a surprisingly unsexy miniseries
about the history of professional football in England wavers.
 
The anxious thoughts have gone nowhere.
They’ve just taken refuge
 
in a blank stare and bad television
and hookups more likely to be cliffhangers— 
 
no way I’m getting dressed
or looking for the keys to the truck.
 
 
   7 a.m.
 
Sitting on the toilet I think to myself:
​
            I don’t know how people
            who voted against Bernie Sanders
            can sleep at night,
            given the state of things.
 
Then I realize:
 
            Nobody can understand
            how anybody else
            can sleep at night.
 
            ​Nobody understands this. At all.
            How anyone ever sleeps.



I Don’t Want this Country To Reopen. I Want this Country To

stay shuttered
like a sea scallop—or
 
a scalloped potato (if you must)— 
as though
 
your life depended on it,
as though
 
you have been very bad
and the imperious, white-bearded
 
fisherman has finally come
down from his cloud,
 
starving
and hunting humans.
 
Stay closed and pray
that this day,
 
snuggled in the juice
of brine and sand,
 
will not be your last.
Don’t get shucked
 
or rush out
to meet your tasty end
 
in the clambake
to end all clambakes.
 
Stay apocalypse 
another day.

---

Ryan Tracy's poetry and fiction have appeared in Pank (2019 Pushcart Prize nomination for fiction), The Hyacinth Review, Chronogram, The New Engagement, K.G.B., The Gay and Lesbian Review, California Quarterly, and Calliope. Essays and criticism have appeared in The American Reader, The New York Press, and The Brooklyn Rail. Ryan is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois. His first collection of poems, Tender Bottoms, was released in 2022. Ryan has a husband and a dog and a house in Upstate New York.