Greg Sendi

Memento Mori

Caucasian Nazarene—old triune lord,
who on the lizard-wingèd dog through hell
rode dance-hall drunk, clutching an iron bell
when you were young—let pass another word

of love impossible submerged. Let pass
again within the soiled, alkali-
expiring, beer- and corn- and sausage pie-
and blood- and borscht- and cabbage-fed cuirass

which girds the city at the lake—this snout-
piece of the Great and Modern Swine-o-Drome
of nations; bring to pass what she has shown
me yet again to live without.

                                                  Regret
may out and yet, by every lurid steel-
ribbed underpass that God may still forget

or government forswear, I swear I feel
I love what we have almost done when I
remember it. And if the days repeal

what’s left (if vestiges there are), when I
have lost the thread of it, I know, beneath
forgetting, that the kiss will sanctify

itself and that the vapor which, like death,
ascends from out the solvent-hollowed skin
of Wacker Drive at night is holy breath

since we at Christmas loved therein.

Greg Sendi is a Chicago writer and former fiction editor at Chicago Review. His career has included broadcast and trade journalism as well as poetry and fiction. In the past year, his work has appeared or been accepted for publication in a number of literary magazines and online outlets, including Apricity, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Clarion, CONSEQUENCE, Flashes of Brilliance, Great Lakes Review, The Headlight Review, The Masters Review, New American Legends, Plume, Pulp Literature, San Antonio Review, Sparks of Calliope, and upstreet.