If You Open the Vault, There Better Be Something Inside

Anthony Borruso

From Wiki rabbit hole to excavating 
Snapchats from the Titanic’s wreckage

and stacking careful decades like Anna
Kendrick just to collapse them with 

the swiftness of a viral dance craze,
clumsy on love, I knock into an image:

Phillip Sidney as an undergrad 
flashing his fake at the tattooed face

of a bouncer. Poor versifier, entering
a flashing cave of bodies, bodies, bodies, 

all victims of helicopter and free-range
parents, idealized romantic traditions

of clever deception and anadiplosis in 
DMs. DMs where, in the style of Vana

White, touch turns to language and language 
leads back to touch. Clickbait muses

and fruitful showers spamming my inbox 
in iambs, I ask, who can die young

in an atmosphere like this? Who could
pine for star-crossed semantics or even

bother waking up Bourbon Street slurring
Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!! 

Now everyone’s moving to Denver. The moon
warns with its sly smile: Better not.

Because the love poem, if nothing else, has shown 
us that recoil’s a killer. It’s cold and the spectacle

of self is getting old. I’ve barely the strength
to retweet Dante or copy/paste a lover’s face. 

And here comes Pandora carrying 
a cardboard Colorado for the USPS. 

She’s no Geraldo making outlandish claims 
about what’s inside. A working stiff, 

she merely gets it where it’s going. 
I don’t blame her. It’s HelloFresh 

that’s sapped the world of mystery. Chicken 
paprika in six simple steps, who’s got time 

to write a sonnet from scratch?

About the writer