I Wake Up, My Eyes Cool and Wet and Blue

But what I see is old and exhausting
vision useless as a fourth brother.
It’s just men and women, the same

characters all day, trapped in my head, twitching
in living rooms, balancing glasses of coke
and beer on their knees, dropping ashtrays

when the door wheezes open—the clattering
on the table, the same hands
plunging through dishwater, groping for spoons.

I see dirty hair framing the dead stare through the window
at dusk, truck idling in the driveway, engine shaking hard
beneath the hood, a bad heart tearing loose.

It’s the men and women silent
as the dust flies up from windowsills
into bands of light, particles of skin striping

the T.V. screen, room filling with her breath
and his heavy breath and the bright, plastic sound
of commercials no one shuts off. Here, nothing

happens until nothing good can, and the old scenes
play in a loop—grainy footage
of the Garden of Eden as I always see it,

always, even when I’m dead wrong—
it’s just the woman as apple, the man the dull tooth.

*Gregory Nicolai is a native of Flint, Michigan where he worked as a process server, eviction worker, and butcher before moving to Mankato, Minnesota to study creative writing at Minnesota State University. His work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Blue Earth Review, and Uncommon Sense.