Happy Valentine's Day! "The Slip" by Michael Montlack

The Slip

by Michael Montlack

Is it possible

to have been tattooed

by someone’s soul?

Only with eyes closed

can I trace outlines,

a slight raise on my unmarked skin

(even in creases: inner elbows,

between fingers and toes).

The designs always familiar

but too abstract to identify.

I mean, can one be widowed

by the living?

Carting the blank stone

from days into dreams

toward an open grave

in my front and back yards,

basement, bathtub.

Ever eluded by the body,

not the scent.

And if there is someone else one day,

will he sense this presence?

The fine slip beneath

my rumpled clothes.

The railing I reach for

even on shallow stairs.

Will you

be the mosquito netting

draping my honeymoon bed,

swaying almost imperceptibly in the dark

but allowing in breezes

that comb the hairs on my arms, 

legs, chest?

This Valentine's Day poetry selection, "The Slip" by Michael Montlack, is the the title poem of "The Slip," published by Poets Wear Prada in 2009.

The Slip
by Michael Montlack
ISBN 978-0-9841844-2-2
Soft Cover, Saddle Stitched, 32 pp.
$10.00 (+ $1.50 S&H)
Release Date: October 2009
Perfect Bound Paperback Now Available at Amazon.com
List Price $10
http://amzn.to/eaV1i9
And on CreateSpace.com
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With pitch-perfect pacing and an intimate colloquial voice, THE SLIP reads as engagingly novelistic even as these memoiristic vignettes are untamed by wit and scathing humor. Ouch. The poems are at once revealing yet winningly imaginative as they reignite myth—there’s even a bisexual Orpheus here who helps Montlack to rewrite the past while instructing, bruising, and exposing suburbia’s lingering melancholy.

—Peter Covino, author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter, winner of PEN/America Osterweil Prize

The many moods of THE SLIP, from fabulous to funny to frenetic, announce the arrival of a promising new voice that can express, with consummate sensitivity and verve, the sorrows and celebrations of our complicated queerness. When Michael Montlack writes, he can make us sing or break our hearts. Each poem is a veritable “kiss of the artist”—passionate and memorable.

—Rigoberto González, author of Other Fugitives and Other Strangers

Michael Montlack's THE SLIP situates us in the middle of a life, threading together joys and sorrows. Some of the comic moments will truly make you laugh out loud. And at times, you'll get horribly wistful. Such is the richness of this collection.

—D. A. Powell, author of Chronic