Tom Snarsky: 3 Poems

EMERGENCY

The axe, lit from the back
as it crashes through the glass

protecting half
a pixelated heart

to buy you / a little time

PREËXISTING

In the weird bank between the forest and now
you go to withdraw funds and the teller just laughs
at you. “Tell you what,” they say, their neutral
expression returning, “we can put you on a loan but
it’ll require some cigarette burns. Does that seem
doable?” The trees cringe. They know what’s up, what
violence can be done through small, incremental harms.

The village is full of neighbors. Respectfully, it is also full
of lies. The teller just tried the other week to fit
one more in—​his body doesn’t make me think
of Goya—and the second they started to speak they felt
the air kicking back like a young horse, coltish
but firm. Suddenly it all seemed totally underwater. You
met the teller in the weeks right after this, don’t forget.

​Difference and Repetition

It starts with an ugly miracle—a scar
of foam on the surface of a lake. What cut
through the water, then clove it together

like a prizefight broadcast signal, its
millions of viewers all huddled around
their tiny screens? Sometimes we are only

unified in opposition. The dead grass
splinters outward from just off the beach.

Tom Snarsky teaches mathematics at Malden High School in Malden, Massachusetts. He is the author of the pdf chapbook Number Among, published by Epigraph Magazine, and the long poem Centurion serialized at aglimpseof. He lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts (among stacks of books and ungraded papers) with his fiancée Kristi and their two cat children, Niles and Daphne. His second pdf chapbook, WEAKEN, is forthcoming from The Argotist Online.