Adam Tedesco
How to Speak about My Heart
My heart’s a Pizza Hut
That doesn’t serve beer
That you have to walk to
Through a cherry orchard
By the time you get there
You realize you could’ve
Eaten free cherries
You wind up hating yourself
For eating this garbage instead
My heart’s fat and lazy
Done too many deadlifts
With horrible form
Its back is shot
It’s tired of dieting
Orders a pizza
Then watches
Every episode
Of Law & Order
With Paul Sorvino
My heart’s your last line
Of coke dissolving
Into condensation
On a toilet tank
You stare
In disbelief
Then a bouncer pulls
At your collar
After the Smoke
The sky’s a knot of wires
And I am with you
To be crushed
Between slabs of time
To make a singing light
I put on Combat Shock
The desperate view of slicing
An arm rubbing junk into the cut
This is the secret of words
A gavel pounding the sea
A fist at rest
A fist we pay for hopelessly
In secret words in wires
Hanging from a chain of days
Word of my mouth
Is all books up in the sky
All wood up in the sky
Transposed in formless
Bands of color killing
Men killing the birds
The secret of the sky
Is pretending it exists
Like us the weekend
After the smoke
My favorite souvenir is a skull shaped ceramic cigarette holder that my grandfather bought in Japan while on leave during the Korean War. My grandfather quit smoking after dropping his cigarette while driving, and then crashing his car trying to retrieve it, resulting in my grandmother having to undergo emergency brain surgery.
Adam Tedesco has worked as a shipbuilder, a meditation instructor, a telephone technician and cultural critic for the now disbanded Maoist Internationalist Movement. He is conducts interviews and analyzes dreams for the online literary journal Drunk In A Midnight Choir. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Witch Craft Magazine, Funhouse, Zoomoozophone Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Hobart and elsewhere. He lives in a religious community outside of Albany, New York, where he prays to rabbits in the dark.