The 2River View 26.4 (Summer 2022)
 
 

Ian Cappelli


 

Items Too Large for Your Travel Bag

Red microfibers in the hotel bathtub. A city fluorescing through the fog like a brain-scan. Slices of image. Wild boars in an enclosure. Men pointing rifles through the blind. An intimate moment with the muzzleloader. Foot mirrors, for shoewear. Cathedral signs which read: “silence.” Red microfibers on the grey shank of wild boar, drenched in gin, set ablaze for the table. Tough to chew. A pelt of wire. Tusk. Introspection for only the feet. A cloche of fog, lifting the city from the city. The brain itself, plated with red winereduction, black squash. Teflon in the body.
 

You Take the Window Seat to Watch the Country

mere moments before its assignee had arrived at the row. He glances at the number on the ticket, then at your chest. As he slumps into the aisle seat, you do not look each other in the eyes. When the wheels rescind, the trucks with big spools of wire are made little. The countryside, divided, then subdivided, into plots. Briefly, over the mountains, the timberline separates everything in view into two remaining fields. While the cabin attempts to sleep, the person in the aisle seat unspools the earbuds supplied by the airline, originally meant for you. Later, one of them falls into the neckline of his shirt, and he takes an extra second in the deciduousness of his hairs. You flick off your reading light. You take what doesn’t belong to you. You squint through the window but it is nighttime now and there is nothing left.


Ian Cappelli is the author of Suburban Hermeneutics (CNP, 2019). His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Atlanta Review, The American Journal of Poetry, The Journal, Lake Effect, The Los Angeles Review, Sugar House Review, and Terrain.org.

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