Lullaby for My Fire House Baby



And just there is lying there and
there is dreaming
rectilineal: our bed lies in direct
line with another & hundreds
just lying aligned until the
road grid torsions or the curvature
of the Earth, I guess

a building we sleep in lies in
direct line with a track a 55th
Firehouse has for yearlies utilized
& isn't a stop their loudly
keeping everybody safe on my acct.
or everybody else's.

And then there comes a whisper at
first not your damn snoring or the sun
which one would have thought
but over and over again,

so relax if sometimes in the bluey
of mornings through the thin
air comes a siren longly singling a slow
& smooth descending a runup to the
sweetened boom we know from old
movies & the fake bazookas
of little kids.

Roll then just back to sleep, for there will
be coffee whistling later
& anyway the bombs these days
are sleek and silent and
guided by light.








Farewell Song for Mister Peter MacIntosh



Up here in a bearing forward
cabin loudly we have a straight
shot, sir, a rainy trawler bobbing

because this being summer, sir,
wherever people we awake are waking
is where the sun is always lighting.

/North I'm always facing North I'll
draw you a picture/

Quicker than our ungraceful
ocean floating and horizontal
as faster as a speeding,

\whenever sunrays curve this rapidly a nightcap
skies itself to choices we're unmaking\

A brightest drop into my deck is
waiting, a glide as brutal than a
Welcome back to Hollywood, where

edging in the bluest local motive
equals finding down a heartbeat,
or a foxhole.












Seth Perlow received an MA in Humanities at the University of Chicago and is pursuing a PhD in English at Cornell. He has been a writer in residence at Elsewhere Artist Collaborative and is an editorial assistant at the Cortland Review. His current projects include sleeping more, writing poems, and translating Spanish philosophy.






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