Long ago, this colony met
in secret congress with itself
to fix the hour of its
future dissolution,
a date stamp invisible
to that fiction called “self”,
an accident which arose
from the assembled elements.
And when, tired of this drunken
stupor of oxygen
and blood, my constituent
tribes disband, the first to leave,
slipping away drop by drop,
will be that which comprises
the bulk of me. The last?
Perhaps a glint of zinc.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 22, Issue 2.
Nick Conrad’s poems continue to appear in national and international journals, and his poems have been featured or favorably mentioned on-line (Verse Daily, new pages.com, Valparaiso Poetry Review’s Twitter list) as well as anthologized. His first book, Lake Erie Blues, will appear in 2020 from Urban Farmhouse Press.
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