The Cage

I.
Bat-handed, two-pronged digits,
your fingers are the eyes

inside the wood. As much Eloi as Morlock.
At the sphinx’s paw, think of the bright forest in the back
of my skull: echo

of an edible chamber gate;

surgical probe
for leisurely feeding, larvae-rich. Lemur me;
murmur eel. Ease me up, little one. Sing Liliata

rutilantium to Eve’s brood, to too many fire-folk
in the branches.

II.
Would be too breezy to bring the end of days into
the year 802,701, past the green porcelain dome, when fire
trucks will long have been forgotten,

when an emergency will not die into this fiery wake
until there’s not a human thing to see.

Little old aye-aye, why did I glimpse ancient industry—
armadillo tank
broken from a volcanic egg?

My alter argos, my dwarf Ophelian
that the ugly homunculi feed on:

Could you really have come up
this short

holy fool—which is to say,
was your shadow of light

this fragile, this tinderbox-
Miniscule?

Author of the article

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, critic, and painter. His co-authored book, Cooking with the Muse, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. His latest collection, The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat, was selected in the Stephen F. Austin University Press Prize contest. He has received the Bordighera Prize Forty Floors from Yesterday (CUNY); the Grolier Prize for Later on Aiaia; a Van Rensselaer Award, selected by Kenneth Koch; several Pushcart Prize nominations; and others. Massimilla has recent poems in AGNI, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, and Verse Daily; and his work has appeared in hundreds of other publications. He holds an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Massimilla teaches at Columbia and The New School. www.stephenmassimilla.com.