Two Poems by Christopher Salerno

BEST FEVER EVER

Dawn’s got a choreography.
When the tall grass shakes out
the night bird and starts
a young fox howling in a ring
of redwood trees. Nothing
can prepare you for waking up.
Not a too-loud owl. Not the mid-
night special unzipping the dark.
We can’t blame our eyes
for opening. Though there are muscles
in the body we never have to use.
A Nijinsky of nothing is what
I was thinking. Like the rabbit
not hopping under the streetlamp.
Or a moth found flat in the pages
of a paperback. You shake it
into the empty bucket beside the bed,
which only confuses the plot
of the book lurching you forward
and backward in time.

HORROR SCRIPT

At school we studied the mysteries
of the amygdala. The self
and its contingencies. If you’ve ever
cupped a lizard in your hands
you understand interiors.
Or a housefly, that little sinner no one loves.
Its greatest fear is not enough air.
Some won’t even make it till dusk
when whoever keeps calling
just breathes and hangs up. All evening
a black Saab idles in your street.
Somewhere in the night you bleed
on the sheets, wake again
to your fear as a thing to rise into.

Christopher Salerno is the author of four books of poems and the editor of Saturnalia Books. His newest collection is Sun & Urn, selected by Thomas Lux for the Georgia Poetry Prize (UGA, 2017). A New Jersey State Council on the Arts fellow, his poems have appeared in The New York Times, APR, Guernica, Fence, and elsewhere. He’s an Associate Professor at William Paterson University in NJ.