Phil Montenegro


Three Poems after Goya

The Third of May, 1808

No prayer or plea or pardon,
cough or cry or heavy breath.

No cold snap of the gun’s
hammer drawn back.
No call for fire or flood

of the fusillade loose
like a torrent of hornets.
Only the man with fearful eyes

wide, his arms raised in the poise
of a butterfly
who sees the implacable iron row

of bayonets outstretched
like the pins of an insect collector
to fix him where he kneels

facing a finality
that doesn't yield.



The Dog

Thrill in the blood
a time to chase and scavenge

to compel the shadows
from their hitch of forms

cock noses to the wind
lead whiskers to the street

every piss-lacquered curb
and fly-gemmed swill

that floods the night
with its riotous smell

draws us further   deeper
into the alleys where

we unbecome and dress
in the slavered rags 

of our primal others
who thundered the flesh	

with a mutiny of instinct
and raw need needing

nothing but the cadence
of their hot breath to rile 

them to nowness just as we
yip and keen and bay 

for the night	   this night
as if no night else could be.



Don Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zuñiga

Everything is about to move.

A boy in red, so still and fixed,
not even an almost-breath 

in his chest betrays
the painting.

A catenary smile of string,
slack between his fingers,

hangs in one calligraphic swoop
to the lank leg of a magpie

whose soot-black beak
carries the card of the painter.

And in the corner a cage
bellyful of finches mid-flutter

deprived of motion
deverbed of action

birds embalmed by the air
that once freed them.

But you, Goya,

are neither in the boy,
the birds, nor the card 

between the bird’s beak
that keeps your name.

You peek through the cats,

gleam

in the sleek aperture of their eyes
as through a peephole

in this portrait

at the shadows amassing
themselves in the distance. 

Phil Montenegro is a poet and teacher. His poetry has appeared in Yale School of Divinity's LETTERS Journal, Nixes Mate Review, Caliban, The Tower Journal, Good Fat, Poem Town 2022/23, Poem City 2023, Ayris Magazine, and Tidepools Magazine for which his poem “Eleven A.M.” won the first prize in poetry for their 50th edition.

 
 

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