Echo Chamber
The dog lifting her head from the floor considers the yipping of a dog from thirty years ago, sealed into a movie’s soundtrack. If ghosts are recordings, all those footsteps people heard in various living spaces might indicate a subscription they signed up for, unaware, and the charges continue to accrue. When in Rome, I did as I always do. The hotel I don’t remember as well as the doors across the plaza that suggested a childish hunger, perfect lozenges of dark chocolate. The love I was with stuck to a strict itinerary. O side hustles, feckless Etruscan gods on souvenirs! Solitude my soundtrack, and a foolish phone call to people who shared a patrilineal surname. There’s a chuckle reserved for mistaken identity that lingers better than I love you, you’re the stranger I’ve brought with me to the stellar field above the villa where a decade of centuries has seen it all and nothing’s been written that we can absorb. I just want my pictures back, a stretch of road that didn’t change for the brevity we idled there, a counterpoint to the maps on my current screen pivoting from summer and back again. Surely it must be kismet–we chose the one with the same name in the long run. The thumb drive a casualty, the thumbs next, so peruse me one last time along the lifeline.
In our dream band, on euphonium:
Michael Tyrell is the author of three collections and the co-editor of a poetry anthology. A writing professor at New York University, he has new poems in Allium, BOMB, and Pine Hills Review. As an actor, he recently appeared in the award-winning short films No Time and Modus Operandi.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 