Two Poems

Mike White

Love Poem

The way people get killed by the Mob
that is how we love.

It is the late night pick-up
and then the long slow drive in the country.

It is my head lying across your torso
in the baroque interior of a black sedan.

It is the beautiful and accidental shape we make
after years in the soft swale of the riverbed.

It is never being discovered.
Not by half.

***

Second Acts

The handcuffed starlet
performing an awkward
backward self-embrace.

The social critic gesticulating
in a public library bathroom stall.
What does this say about us?

The glassy-eyed cyclist-turned-
analyst recalling how in the Pyrenees
he could always dream away his legs.

The swing vote in the jury box
itching for forty years
in the place a landmine dispatched.

Mike White is originally from Montreal and now makes his home in Salt Lake City. He is a recent graduate of the doctoral program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and a former editor of Quarterly West. His poems have been published in journals including The New Republic, The Threepenny Review, The Iowa Review, The Antioch Review, Poetry, AGNI, and Verse.

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