Still Life with Blinging Emergency Door

Seamus Heaney + Kanye West

Baby, I’ve been feeling you like a theme
song since I stepped off that off-brand
city bus & onto this funky street
where I get my gentlemen on, tipping

my chapeau to a moon poking through
the clouds like a felt shark’s fin. Baby,
I felt rain on my chest with the persistence
of a Jesus piece knocking about

in the bogs & puddles. There’s a gravel
rooftop liquored behind the emergency
door, the emergency of your summer
dress held tight by the iciest safety pin

& so we bling in our own effervescence.
We sing in pink lipstick’s happenstance.

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka

Adrian Matejka is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), which was a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. His new collection, The Big Smoke, abo