Birmingham
Poetry
Review
Magritte
Magritte is wandering looseas a cummerbund
at the end of the senior prom.
Hey, Magritte, come here. There's
a head on a chair,
dogs licking their intimate selves.
But Magritte has one eye on
the revels of sawdust
between the stormy night waves.
Through the mail slot in Magritte's
door, an admirer
has slid the skeleton of a pheasant.
Magritte immediately frees it up.
He, too, would
have sent it to himself, but express.
He places it on a chess board, lies
down next to it,
thinking checkmate to flesh it out.
It picks up his brushes, paints
its way out of checkmate,
square by square, across the canvas.
--James Doyle
James Doyle's new book, Bending under the Yellow Police Tapes, will be published by Steel Toe Books in 2007. He has poems forthcoming in Xavier Review, Appalachia, Georgetown Review, The Cape Rock, and Porcupine Literary Arts Review.
