No. 5, 1948
We lit the candles right at the end of the cul-de-sac along
Charlestown Beach, recited all the right incantations
to try and make your ghost reappear,
scared like children, we ran away onto the abandoned golf course
right as Sufjan Steven’s Casimir Pulaski Day began to play,
running to the edge of the leafy woods like the 2-month old
fawns learn to run away,
and at the very top of the hill we saw the two purple sunsets,
and they dripped out of the sky like Jackson Pollock’s No. 5, 1948,
but our own stalwart sun had already set that day,
and we knew that the world was dying, and that we were all dying too—
that we had only a few seconds left.
Jéanpaul Ferro is a 10-Time Pushcart Prize nominee from Scituate, Rhode Island. His poetry and short fiction has been featured on NPR and in Emerson Review, Columbia Review, Contemporary American Voices, Portland Monthly, Salzburg Review, Connecticut Review, and many others. He is the author of Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry and Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011) nominated for 2012 Griffin Prize in Poetry, as well as the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Prize in Poetry.
