Kappa by Matthew Minicucci

It’s raining again, you say. Near flow and no-slip. Car on the curvature of space and time and boxed wine. Here: the clear empty well of a disappointed glance. New glacier. Gravitation and some brief disturbance of co-habitation. Volume as a function of change in pressure and stress. What a fucking mess.

By which I mean these voices long-graveled. By which I mean a singular sort of silence caught in the distribution of moments: steel fixed joint; live load at an adjacent point. All of it indeed a moving, variable weight.

Factor this, solve for that. Say for any cardinal along the road, Z is true. Z might be number of beats possible by each wing divided by miles not migrated. Or how it’s always a sad, sad distance to one special, sharp-crested mate; that tiny brown sweater she always likes to wear in winter.

Matthew Minicucci is the author of two collections of poetry: Translation (Kent State University Press, 2015), chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2014 Wick Poetry Prize, and Small Gods, forthcoming from New Issues Press in 2017. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Wick Poetry Center, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received his MFA. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2014, Blackbird, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review, among others.