five poems
by Von Wise
Four Celebrities as Seasons
Tom Cruise
The feathers of dead birds
are everywhere these days.
I think they might be sick,
or maybe its just spring.
I imagine picking them up
off the street, my hands
crawling with lice. It’s gross.
So I leave them alone.
***
Martin Scorsese
God I stink. Sometimes
the sweat comes out of me
like a promise of easier hours.
Sometimes it carries the sour
ideas forgotten in the car
window in July. If I could
account for all my sewage,
I’d lock that ledger in the trunk
and drive it off a cliff, my double
visibly praying in the back seat.
***
Benedict Cumberbatch
The train was so late
the woman beside me
was holding nothing
but a burger patty
in her hand when it
arrived. The rest had been
discarded like November
leaves on the track, colorfully
rotting mementoes. By the time
we all squeezed meat-
to-meat in the car,
I learned my stop
would be skipped.
I’d need to transfer.
***
Kurt Angle
Traffic moves like a bear
in winter. Lumbering and
thick with sleep. I’d punch it.
I’m running late, and nothing
can stop me.
Mike Bloomberg
Oh the great brain!
The money comes in waves:
no poison, no dead children,
finally, no wheezing money.
Efficiency only. City streets,
the brain-paths of microchips.
Conjured up by being there
already! Only need to know
where to look, like oil,
great underground lakes,
like the souls of cave fish.
Great brain, tell me,
please, when & where. I’m
so poor still. Clean me
with the fire of your mind,
great brain. Mine is at its end.
Billy Mays
The houses. The houses,
the houses. From where
in the distance
did they arrive? They find
us unfurred and afraid,
needing shelter. And the weather.
How to enter one,
I wonder like a vampire.
Native soil? The houses
peering down and over
each other. And I
am cold in gray drizzle.
I will die in one of those,
I hope, decaying and unfound
in its belly until I am
stumbled upon and reeking
in my solid death. Yes,
it will be a good day. I will be home.
Rush Limbaugh
I'm disgusted
by how good I feel
sometimes. In the afternoon,
the bloody chunks.
In the evening, family.
A new egg of remembrance.
How to know joy? How
not to? Really, how to
do what must be done?
There will always be
automobiles, it seems like,
but that's wrong.
Words on a page
like small birds falling
to death or flight.
At night, an ornamental box
of oracle bones
glows like pear blossoms
in moonlight.
In ambiguity, many things
converge. By morning,
disgust again.
Love Poem
Off in the distance, the village pervert
watches us making love
in the afternoon heat. We regard him
as harmless, the way we'd regard a dog
or bird and continue with our wet return
into one another.
That night, by firelight he spends hours
carving two simple stone statues
the size of his palm, remembering
our bodies, rendering us continually nude.
For hours he shapes and rubs stone against stone,
one unmistakably erect, one
with a corresponding carve-out.
800 years later, this is all that will remain
of our culture. A team of archaeologists
set out to colonize even the past
will find them, roughly date them, carry them
away. The junior excavator unearthing
the two figures will laugh and hold them up,
inserting the rod into the hole and rotating
the stones clockwise and counterclockwise,
getting a laugh out of the local guide.
He will be scolded and have the statues
depicting us taken away. We will be shipped
off to a museum, two small artifacts
labelled "A Man" and "A Woman."
And this is the larger injustice,
to have our love taken away, reduced
to simple identifying features. We will survive
broken in half, as "A Man" and "A Woman"
and not the elaborately divine thing we were
that afternoon while the warm season
melted us together. Museumgoers will study us
seriously, as if there is something new to learn,
like we might teach them something they've forgotten.
Here and there, like the junior excavator,
someone, laughing, will point to our identifying features
and get closer to the truth.
But mostly they regard us as a dog or a bird
would regard the spear tips and bits of pottery
that encircle us unintelligibly,
having nothing to say but their suggestive broken bodies
Photo of Von Wise
BIO: Von Wise received his MFA for Creative Writing from Florida International University and is the author of Grow a Cowboy, winner of the 2025 Beyond Words Poetry Chapbook Awards. His poetry and prose have been published and anthologized by Lucky Jefferson, Inverted Syntax, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, Philadelphia Stories, Red Ogre Review, and elsewhere. He teaches English and Creative Writing in Philadelphia, where he lives.