Eric Pankey

If from ruins one imagines past grandeur,

Listen: no seraphic dialogue. Only weeping.

Exhausted, bewildered, bent with suffering,

Figures crowd a shallow space.

JUNE DEPRESSION

Once the errant cloud moves on, the sky will heal over.

Today, tomorrow: two sentences hitched by a semicolon.

Although the bees are fire amid blossoms, I carry my depression like a bag of ice in winter.

The past? Back there at an impossible distance.

The whiskey made me invisible,

But only to myself.

Back then, one could postpone the future with a story.

At first glance: disorder.