Thomas Fucaloro

can’t stop writing

about the dying

This machine is empty. Needs more fortunes.
More captured light. This apartment is empty.

This Brita filter is rotted. Needs more Soylent
greens. This picture of you, holding me, stares

at me. Is it disrespectful for me to put it in a drawer
next to my envelopes and white out? I was disrespectful

during your living so why should what has gone, pass
as anything but drunk butterfly? These stained walls

smell like the unfiltered cigarette smoke of childhood
etched in my teeth. I can’t get out of bed. Dust bunnies

growing colonies. My melvins t-shirts are growing impatient.
My mattress is growing a fetal shaped enclave. Thimbles and

thorns. An empty full on. I don’t think I can relate. But I think
I do. I don’t think I can relate. But I think I do. This machine

is empty. Needs more fortunes. Painting clouds on the ceiling
of my mouth. Parting seas with my gums. Coping with nightmares

is the grinding of teeth. I can feel the grains fall on my tongue.
I swallow each nightmare whole. I wake up. Full of fortunes.



Con Edison keeps calling every day
letting me know that there is life-support-
equipment in my mother’s house but because
of the heat index service could be interrupted
even though my mother has been gone for over
a year and we no longer live in the house.

*

the sun is

always

trying

me



What has died often lives on through energy.

This source of life could possibly interrupt
my mother’s nonexistent-life-support-service.

The sun is a strange philosopher
or a
too good to be at this open mic poet.

It has so much to slam poetry every day. Inspiring/
agitating all over our lives perspiring in the name of
perseverance. It was the sweatiest of times. The sun
is life-support-equipment. My mother was life-support.
My mother is.

*

Con Edison best get me a customer service representative
like the moon to help calm things down, add penance to peril,
shade to sharp. If I were the sun, I’d carve out the moon and
wear it like a coat. Con Edison has me on hold. My mother
has me on hold. Every day. Con Edison calls to remind me
the sun grows brighter.

*

The maternal of longing is never lost
in the dwelling heart of a child. Or some
new age bullshit like that. On days that it rains
I receive no phone calls at all. Unless there’s a storm.
If it’s a storm, I know that’s my mother reminding me
to never forget that what has died often lives on through

us.

*

The sun is trying.



hyphen

Since these deaths, the landscape of life has changed
amongst the downtrodden who harness what they don’t
have and still turn to glow, until someone kills that too
in the name of some importance, we need to hold onto
the name of our own calluses, how we glove them,
fingerlessly. How we handle.

Since these deaths, I’ve found the strength in the
subtraction, that mad punctuation disguised as a
hyphen that brings words together and sets numb-
ers apart. What we lose we create to minus. What’s
in our heads. The conductor’s violence sounds like
small victories. Since these deaths, I’ve listened
to less music



Thomas Fucaloro has won grants from the Staten Island Council of the Arts, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, NYC Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes, and NYC Commission of Human Rights. He holds an MFA from the New School and is a founding editor of Great Weather for Media and NYSAI press. He is an adjunct professor at Wagner College, BMCC and CSI.  Instagram: @thomasfucaloro