Brian Tierney
Brian Tierney is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University, and a graduate of the Bennington College MFA Writing Seminars. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming in: Kenyon Review, AGNI, New England Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, and others. In 2013, he was named among Narrative Magazine‘s “30 Below 30” emerging writers, and is the 2018 winner of the George Bogin Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He lives in north Oakland, and teaches poetry at The Writing Salon.
Migraine
It starts at the end; the lights of cars
distorted to a burst, for a second
like asterisks, or seraph wings, extravagant & huge
as they pass me
in the exhausted sweep of fog over Mars, PA, then Punxsutawney
Parish, & New Stanton, though it’s no heaven
here—the Turnpike in the rain. Cars pass & continue to
pass, & soon will arrive,
some of them, in Breezewood or Erie, where their lives have been
decided by now.
So my eyes sting O, The Glory & go dead. I pull over
outside Somerset; there’s a rodent broke-open, a pomegranate
to the butt of a hammer, its head
useless, even to birds. It hurts to look at,
as in blood-phlegm coughed up in a bathtub. Only the body knows.
My old man, the story goes,
right before he died, he shouldered the Windstar, pulled over
to phone her, me, anyone
on his way somewhere East of
Poquessing, a faint, red fingertip print smeared on the dash
as though someone had crushed a clover mite.
Coda With A Corpse Floating In The Patapsco
River—which means tide covered with froth—which means no
that isn’t the first snow
forming in his eyes when the fire crews find him on the south end
of Baltimore;
his knees like split grapefruits floe-slashed under fog the shippers
pass through
like the breath of a horse I saw, on its side, outside Lancaster
when I was nine
with my father, buying trinkets the Amish carved to pass their self-
denial even
fallen Catholics envy; & the eldest one, or most certainly one of
the elderly ones
hosing off the blood where the ankle of that indescribable heap broke
through cleanly,
leaving a spot in the grass, a tumor in a petscan
seen from above:
so you could look at the shape your inner blight had taken long before
your organs had
caught up to your mourning what’d always been dying & unkeepable
anyway. Like a battery
I find floating. A father. It’s never
about the horse—
for Edgar