The Upper Room by Matthew Milia

Bad insulation forms
The sad creation of
One heavy eight-foot-long icicle
And there unridden sleeps
The frostbitten frame of
Our sunken-in tandem bicycle
With an endless art for recycling breakfast
And an after-school comfort
Unimaginable
Two costume earrings and
One matching necklace
And two black eyes
Undeniable
Two soiled halves of
One folded mattress
An island on ice
Nice and pliable
There on the floor
There are two bodies tangled
By the price of
Becoming unpryable
But they’re liable to be

Kicking around a small blow-up globe
Of the world that is see-through and
Inflatable
Still holding breath from your last abode
Where we filled it with air
Untranslatable
The thick-carpet-world where the
Streetlamps explode
In the spring
At the dawn
With the smiling tears
Breaking the night as the morning flowed
Through my slight overbite
And your dialing ears
Piling the ways

The planks and the rails of the L lifted up and
Across
Wabash
Like a balcony
And the city’s light returns with its kills and it
Fills up my eyes
With its
Falconry
And I felt very bad you know
‘Cause you’d never been to Chicago
And you’d been bugging me
And then you turn and you see me go
To Chicago with some
Other company
It’s gonna be the way

But our upper room was so insulated that
No holy fire coulda smoked us out
Touching the wounds my fingers penetrated
And they brushed and they hushed and they
Poked about
Three bobby pins on one bedside table
While three soft lamps often blasted out
On two shut-ins in one bulging cradle
Inflated within while there without
A wilderness did grow

So blow up a room and Saran-wrap the windows
In the winter
To make sure
It never leaks
Become entombed in each other’s shadows
That rattle and shift
With the wall and weeks
Two slanted ceilings and
Twelve suffocations
Waiting on hot tongues
But it rarely speaks
Despite one white candle
And night invocations
Bones and a bed frame
That moans and creaks
I see two parents in one sleeping visage
Beneath two soft tufts of swerving brows
Did you sense the burning?
Well that was my message
A marking to come build a room somehow
A burning breathing room