Tony Mancus
from In Any Sense
The package you carry back to where you got it from and hope
People are posting their lives in light better than they live in
The basic premise of betterment aesthetics is being able to change
As if as a choice for a treat and after everything falls apart together and all at once
Too many people think other people are not people
Maybe it’s the system or the selves that inhabit it
If you’re popular in the winter and among people who don’t know you – this can be a measure
I watch the cats watch me as I clean up what they leave behind
It’s sometimes sunny on the weekends
That there are days we claim for ourselves makes me weep
What question do you not know how to ask
One’s life can span between several generations or fewer
A quiet distance to be together in however many breaths
Vacuums gain strength as time progresses - teleologically
You can look up the pressure per square inch on your device
It will be interesting when we stop calling pocket computers phones
Tomorrow I’ll have a different idea about how I should pretend to know any number of things
What is an adult without grief
The small things we break against and the bigger things we fail to fathom
I see the absence of feeling as a way to cope but it really doesn’t help
It’s hard to avoid images for too long
I fill one bag with another bag and maybe that’s the soul in one form
How a word doesn’t take shape but the idea it contains might
Maybe that’s backwards
I don’t trust the things we say to believe in us the way we believe in each other’s saying
I hear my mother’s voice inside of mine
You count a reflection even if it’s partial, but there are points lost
“Beauty is at its peak when no one is looking” - Shimoda
I dream of a house that I didn’t grow up in but lived in thoroughly—the outside has become its wall color, earth in the toilet upstairs and pale green paint chips everywhere
Aunt Laurie, can I have a bun?
Whatever echo your voice is through time and remembered by others
I sit with my hands holding each other
The boy says daddy like it’s a syllable longer than it is and I imagine that extra length to be love
This has gotten sadder than I thought
The demons we know will tell us the truth and sometimes the demons we don’t know
We watch television with our feet under the covers or not
The world is hard
You can say something with conviction even if it’s wrong
Things continue changing and that is maybe time shaking its influential hair out like a model
Whatever gender you picture says something about your preferences and capital
Tomorrow I’ll forget nearly everything
The pauses between
I take work away from work and work away from sleep
It’s a comma before the storm, who knows what after
Next to the space next to the building you grew up in is another building or its ghost
Today debris that was likely someone’s home was lifted 20000 feet into the sky
What can’t you be taken away by/with
I press the idea of a seed into the idea of the earth on the living room floor with my son and he pats the seeded earth as payment
I can’t fathom this floor in the sky
Tony Mancus is the author of a handful of chapbooks, including Apologies (Reality Beach), Bye Sea (Tree Light Books), and City Country (Seattle Review). His first full length collection will be published by The Magnificent Field. He works as an instructional designer, serves as chapbook editor for Barrelhouse, and lives in Colorado with his wife, son, and three yappy cats.