Anthony Santulli is a New Jersey born writer with a B.A. in Creative Writing and Italian from Susquehanna University. His recent work has appeared in minor literature[s], the tiny journal, Juste Milieu Lit Review, Bartleby Snopes, and Literary Orphans.

After Bryn Harrison’s “Repetitions in Extended Time”

Gravity, for a day’s worth of alimony. Room after room of waiting gives way to a shallow trench, pooled with printer ink. Portraits of the living point to nowhere. Forward in time is only more time, trailings that orient themselves as spectated objects. How Schoenberg saw his face in the dissonance, the river doesn’t need a name to be polluted. Blue stings, picks at the needling feathers that compose it. So, it is erasure, not hunger, that allows a body to assimilate.

There, in the pointless vertices of an office where space is algorithmic and able to be sliced with a butter knife. The varnish is removed and then applied until no horizontal can claim its edge. In extended touch, the patchwork of a cellular song fragile and piercing as stubble. Like the bird before a tree, my age confronts eternity to make a home of it. Adjacent is a field of mimes, silently prophesying. Heads unspool, and just like that a candle’s wick between the fingers.

Are Conspiracy Theorists Optimists?

The best way to criticize a movie is to make
another movie. Replace each scene with a bird.
The mayor says, “Art cannot change
the price of eggs.” His wife trims the hedges.

In Bacchanal gardens, the widow plucks
a plastic harp. At last her lips open, and with
the song of the robin!

   “Don’t talk nonsense to me. Say it again
   and say it slow. Break into your mouth. Silence is
   the experience of the body, a distant and imperfect copy
   that will capsize any moment.”

When I think about the responsibility we have to each other,
this is where I start: I’m proud to be beautiful
even in passing. Cartoon characters envy
my biologically correct heart. Yet more and more
I find myself with my back to the wind
asking, where is it I think I’ve been?

zombie (after Tauba Auerbach)

blind to color
	bind to light

that noise	never cycles

	but some days spin
a new language from decay

could I shout my regrets
the way a child bubbles
and wakes one day 
with pebbles in their eyes?

		crisp touch of autumn
		send me to the grave

when the waves bend like coat hangers
and the rosary won’t sing

find me at the edge of extinction
find me folding into this page