William Stratton

What I Saw

Plates scattered with the ash of a few

hundred cigarettes, brown bottoms

falling over one another as legs in a mass grave.

Everywhere bottles with the liquor gone

and now carrying some small part of his lips.

Bits of food; crumbs, here or there

a bone, the black residue of condiments gathering

nervous swarms of insects which lifted on clear

wings and settled again from time to time. Flies

made a home too, on his mouth. In it. When they

rose in unison I thought he might have spoken.

One lid hung open, and I remember sometimes

before sleep the way an eye looks

when it no longer sees—as if the world were

unsurprising, colorless, static. I will not

speak of the smell. Only his hands looked

the same, one caught on the taut loop a belt

pushed against, the other reaching still

towards the brown, mottled carpet,

and the upright beer can; red and catching

the fractured sun from the blinds, throwing

it out again to dance against the flat walls.

William Stratton currently lives and write in Newmarket, New Hampshire, where he teaches for the University of New Hampshire. His first full length collection of poetry, Under The Water Was Stone, is due out in May of 2014. His previous publishing credits include: The Cortland Review, 2River, Pif Magazine, Best of Pif Magazine, Untitled Country Review, Spillway, The North American Review, The Lindenwood Review (where his poetry was nominated for a pushcart), and others.