By Holger.Ellgaard 10:53, 21 October 2007 (UTC) [<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0">CC BY 3.0 </a>], from Wikimedia Commons

"Most photos are fabricated moments."

A Couch She Loved

• Now, stacked
• between packed boxes
• lining a spare bedroom

• a couch she loved
• in a house
• I was tired of haunting

• I left because
• the body recognizes
• on its own

• despite denial—
• how long can you hold your breath
• and call it living?

• I left because
• of night’s strange flesh
• pressing her against

• the couch
• she loved,
• closing my throat—

Empty Glass

• when you fall into a bottle,
• make sure you are the one
• doing the swallowing
• it can be so easy to forget
• how to breathe

• keep remembering
• or your sorrow will not be
• the thing that drowns you

• don’t look for answers
• chances are you didn’t come here
• to find the right one
• chances are you prefer darkness
• to a reflection, but all the walls here
• are mirrors

• scrape her name from your tongue
• replace it with the taste
• of rock bottom

• this bottle will never fill the space
• left by her shade
• love makes for a menacing hangover

• when you wake up,
• take the cracks for what they are
• a heart with no scars has never truly loved
• so learn to shatter,
• gather your ashes
• & let the past pass through you
• like sunlight
• through an empty glass

Candid

• Most photos are fabricated moments. An imitation of
• truth, skewed, fish-eyed. In real life, the party stops
• when someone wants to take a picture. Conversations

• are paused; attention, diverted. Smiling in the same
• direction never would have happened, had the
• lens not asked it of you. When I look through old

• albums, I try to remember what happened after the
• shutter-snap. I wonder what changed when someone
• stopped trying to capture the moment and, instead,

• let it roam free. The truth is that life, like beauty, does
• not require a pose. Most of the time, it happens when

• no one is looking.

Brennan DeFrisco is a poet, writer, spoken word artist & educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s the author of A Heart With No Scars (Nomadic Press) and co-author of Exquisite Duet (Hermeneutic Chaos Press). He’s been a National Poetry Slam finalist, a runner-up for the Drake University Emerging Writer Award and is currently the Grand Slam Champion of the Oakland Poetry Slam. He is a California Poets In The Schools teaching artist, as well as a performance coach for Poetry Out Loud. His work has been published in Words Dance, jmww journal, Gemini and other publications. Brennan enjoys words & the way they move. He loves movies, poker, whiskey, Firefly, and Allie Marini more than you do. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at Antioch University Los Angeles.