What I mean to say is depth can be illusory.
If you wore red-cyan 3D glasses
and leafed through me like a flipbook,
you’d see there’s more to me than cartoon drunkenness.
Before coming home late without my clothes on
and stumbling bare-assed to the fridge for one more beer,
I spent hours wandering drunk and naked
through a cornfield for you.
I plastered my body in mudhusk
and tried to blend with the dead stalks,
swearing if I could see the lambent bronze dome
of Pozzo’s trompe-l’oeil at Sant’ignazio
hidden in all that corn,
I could fix the parallax of us
and understand why making love
feels more like drawing phantograms.
But you’ve got to look past my penis,
past the boozy moonlight and the flatness
of soil on my skin. There is pulp in me
deep down. Cup me like a mound of earth,
press me into a ball, roll me out between
your palms, make me into anything
you’ll always want to hold.

###

Samuel Piccone is the author of Pupa, which was Editors’ Choice in the 2017 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize with Anhinga Press (forthcoming 2018). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications including The Southeast Review, Passages North, Southern Indiana Review, and Zócalo Public Square. He received an MFA in poetry from North Carolina State University and serves on the poetry staff at Raleigh Review. Currently, he resides and teaches in Nevada.

“Sometimes You Look at Me Like I’m Only A Stack of Papers” by Samuel Piccone was first published by The Boiler.