Reflex Arc
At night, when the moon is hungry enough for ghosts, you watch
them disappear, one shade after another, a carnival line of visitors who have touched you
entering the
mirrors, which never look back. When the doctors say your abandonment issues are a projection,
you laugh until cigarette smoke
chokes the plastic Ficus. What are these walls for if not a flickering testimony
of all your eyes have filmed over with, a glaze of memory as caustic as learning the names of
those who leave you
for the ocean. Who leap from the Golden Gate, dive
into traffic, eyes open the whole time. The one who walked out with your knives as if she feared
you might hurt yourself
more, jealous of any wound not bearing her name. Sometimes I think shadows are secret tattoos
we dress up for social occasions
to hide the absence we carry under our skin. But there are lighthouses on coastlines I have
not yet studied for light. Whole windows in houses that show me
no enemies. I have fallen in love with myself over less.
Zachary Kluckman is an award-winning poet based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. An alumnus of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop, he was selected by Oliver de la Paz as the winner of the 2024 Two Sylvia’s Press Chapbook Prize. Kluckman has been recognized with a Thomas Lux Scholarship to the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, the Button Poetry Short Form Poetry Award, and multiple local and national slam poetry honors. His work appears or is forthcoming in Crab Orchard Review, Asheville Poetry Review, Little Patuxent Review, Arts & Letters, and Wesleyan University Press’ Dear Yusef and others. He is the author of three poetry collections and is THE Founder of the Chicharra Poetry Slam Festival.