In the Attic

All the fake people here
in original caskets. Ownership
has wilted the eyelashes.

Watch us in scratches
make ourselves small.
Our breathing gives us

away. Overhead hang
our braided mirrors.

And the tilted ceiling
drips nails like a crown.

The Apple

is not a set of red curves married
to each other’s strong forces,

or an old maid’s tear
grown thick with polish,

or a nest for embryonic stars,
or a rotund devil with hair

like gelatin, his eyes unshod.
The apple does not

embrace itself, or the fallen
earth rising up to meet it.  

Dan Rosenberg is the author of The Crushing Organ (Dream Horse Press, 2012), which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize, and cadabra (Carnegie Mellon University Press, forthcoming). A PhD candidate at the University of Georgia, he co-edits Transom.