POETRY BY NICHOLAS ALTI

From rural Michigan, Nicholas Alti is a bartender in Atlanta who holds an MFA from The University of Alabama. He is interested in horror, arcana, silliness, and surrealism. More poetry from Nicholas is in or forthcoming in Lotus Eater, PULP Literature, Whiskey Tit, Red Ogre Review, and Star*Line. 

LAPSARIAN

Agate eyes, amethyst rictus: I’m the shiny beautiful, the gaslight ghost
with a pulsing heart in one hand and
residuals in the other hand. You can
see the skull of my first and last sister between splayed fingers. Go ahead,
you can see my chakras are ammonites tonight.

A misdirected hominid
mistaken for tender lamb
tied to a lamp-post on the dirt street. All windows nailed shut, all doors barricaded,
red ribbon round my neck and they say there are things that walk the night here.

I’d find you wings had I known; I’d mend your wings could I sew.

My dog meat body smells baroque—
I’m the great constellation aorta, I hold the whole heart beating, I hold
night collapsing into day.

Bernini’s Faun
teased by children, except not sculpted marble in a museum,
an obsidian goat’s head on a wooden stake
in Romania. Come eclipse! I’m the forest of impaled bodies, already the flesh
of Wallachian mythology

VANTAGE OF OMISSION

A veil of stratus breaks into mist; a bleak
portent opens and then opens wider like spider-web twined
beetle legs or sprawled corpse staked wide
spangled into a cradle or cruciform mound of soil
made rich by song-less blood loss; a type of interlude
appeasing no one, relieving no one, a whole atmospheric
cleave, now a blanket of undulation obfuscates
what was a pink dawn turned into a frosted-glass stasis;
a pale surrender paints this gawking population,
where torture of cold crawls across axis across coordinates
stillness breaks then closes in as we turn to each other

APPARITION

Proper ghosts have no story,
let no energy linger.
I hope not to create litter
with my humble going:

vesper like a happy wave
at the wrong person,
flush of unprecedented
shame, this guffaw,
this making a show
for them to turn off.

Everyone deserves a lucidity slip
near Lake Lanier,
to spread the legends of gnomes
among Big Sur’s foggy bosom,
convinced for a moment
some places are mystic.

Witness an eclipse,
wonder why
you’re here—
silly glasses,
chapped lips,
where you left from—
worrisome stuff,
how dark a body
so luminous
can become.