Three Poems by Gabriel Parsacala

If Nothing Else, Set the Scene

1.    AN UNLIT ROOM WITH A TABLE - EARLY EVENING, AT LEAST TO ALL PRESENT

 The room is vacant save for two chairs

that beg for bodies, in only the way

empty seats do. Despite this, the table is

set, a number of objects present seemingly

only to be consumed in the space

between exchanges. It carries with it

a certain heft that reader and audience alike

know to be intolerable, but will gladly suffer

through - not being the ones to bear it. You

won’t fill this space. But it is dressed with

unassuming ceramic, hardly pristine but

otherwise unspoiled. A meal meant to chase

around, to prod, to decimate with cheap

department store forks, unserrated

butter knives. We tend to destroy

things in other things stead. When

the hands come to do all they need to do

in relation to their absentee forms,

they will take all they can, leaving nothing. 

This place is meant to be entered and left,

never to return with precisely the same

motions. We know this. We know this. 

We know this. 

So enter. 

Mankind, the Apothecary

       jars on a high shelf
       mine a bundle       of dry moss

               knife-gutted pine
               bark        paired-letter intentions
               far removed       from the one/two

                                                            nature/time

 fistfuls of           rock sand
                     coarse grit

                                   unfit for backs

                   brown shore       where dawn
                   departs on slow eternities
                   from clumsy      stumbling beginnings

      & descends      from where things     just were
                 & seemingly always had been

                               so why     would we think up
                                                 any ending

     we left             no, were left
                                      for who would find us

              & make some sense or
              if we’re lucky        use        

                           of all of this. 

Too Little of the Ocean

A whole eighty percent looms - anyone’s guess.

Can you stand that? Because it looks like you can.

So much goes out,

probing the mapped concentricities

of this breathless universe. 

I know so little

of my own bones. That’s just humanity.

Fiery-eyed contentment. Backseat Manifest Destiny.

I need to get far, far away from my atoms

like that’ll make death feel less the same.

As if the small gods look different

whether you go up or down. Infinity

is the spilled ink of the Pacific span.

The soft bioluminescence of something close

to stars. The distant sunlight that scatters

across the mercury of their upper atmosphere

a distant father that knows everything they

couldn’t - and in his peripheral,

a whole other unknown, just as unknowing. 

About the author:

Gabriel Parsacala is a poet and writer residing in New Jersey. Read his interview with Poetry Culture and follow him on Instagram.