Poem of the Week

Mirascope

Brian Orozco

After the step I assumed

was last was another.

One explains

the sum of color.

Deciduous images

smuggled from sleep.

Now of these

two, pick one, and from

these four, pick three,

says the cuck.

In quicksand—as

with trompe l’oeil—

slapstick chucks peril. Breathe

through your tongue.

We’ve been here before,

you don’t know it yet.

You, me, plankton

protein whipped

by the storm

to the shore.

The Yale Review · “Mirascope” by Brian Orozco

what surprised you about the composition of this poem?

The sensation of palpating ground with your foot to confirm you have indeed reached ground after descending a flight of stairs in the pitch dark—I wanted to write into whatever you might call the precise inverse of this feeling. I realize only now that behind (or perhaps hovering above) the poem’s structure is a ghost form of couplets: a left and right foot ascending/descending. This is the titular poem of a manuscript in progress; this poem is among the last I wrote for it.

Brian Orozco holds an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art and an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is currently participating in the Scholar’s Program at the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis.

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