“Our room tonight is a network” by BJ Soloy

of lights. A string of bulbs—

which I write by—strung to altar

our bed I write on. Your noise

when you blow out the candle

is an airplane. Your click when you

turn off the desk lamp is a snap.

You are a machine & a magician.

When you sleep, a campfire burns

& I hear two hundred cracking

knuckles, windows, bulbs, necks.

There are fireworks you can’t even

see. This sleep of yours a disaster.

✶✶✶✶

BJ Soloy’s Our Pornography and other disaster songs was selected by Ocean Vuong as the winner of the 2018 Slope Editions Book Prize. He also has a chapbook, Selected Letters, out with New Michigan Press. With poems in places like FIELD, Colorado Review, LIT, Forklift, Ohio, BOAAT, and Guernica, he lives and dies in Kansas City.