Coagulate by Derek Sugamosto

Go into delirium
echoing will rescue you
and pattern your standards
into words fit for blocking

a voice behind the placard
when looked at directly
becomes indelicate intrusion
and sears all nerves, optical
and otherwise
into a single monstrous ligature
trembling with memory

Go into shallows
where the beasts don’t fit
the harbor itself a languid
tendril, prehensile tongue

like the unlettered urge
toward allegory, the form
presents itself
in reciprocity, the revelation
is the skin of the water going slack
in anticipation
of formidable, clumsy movement

Go into asylum
the scope of stone, the captured
fable, the bone dry sinus
of a leather heart

what distinguishes this farm
is its artificial lake, irrigation runoff
oversaturated crop
the bloated earth spits its food
back out, unless
the country we don’t think about
carries itself over in the cold

Go into flesh
enthousiasmos delivers
ageless birth, confers
primacy upon remembrance

when along lightning’s jagged path
as all hues bleed
in periphery, declaim yourself
through a wool-clotted throat
in halting, fluid cadence
until the stars rescind their sidereal glance
and find a way out of heaviness

“Coagulate” first appeared in apt‘s third print annual, now available for purchase.

Derek Sugamosto is a freelance editor from a small town in the metro Detroit area of Michigan. After years of writing, he has recently committed to submitting his work for publication. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Greatest Lakes Review, Sheepshead Review, and Orange Coast Review. In addition, he has forged a psychic bond with a cat named Gracie.

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