David O’Connell: “Period Piece”
PERIOD PIECE
We’re living days we know
will end up in the movies.
Some evening, years on,
we’ll be in the dark, many of us
recalling or trying to recall
where we were in these moments
we’ll be reliving through a lens
and through those actors
whose faces we’ll line up
beside the faces so familiar to us now.
These are the memories
we’ll haul into the theater
that’ll keep us from becoming
entirely lost to the suspense of the film,
while the film’s good script
keeps us from losing ourselves
to our recollections, softened by time,
of these days now vibrating
with the tension of a single violin
scraping up an accelerating scale
over interstitial shots
of the instantly familiar
all of which insist
upon the gravity of these days
we’re living hour-by-hour
with an anticipation I can’t imagine
any director will quite capture
since then
we’ll know how this must end.
David O’Connell has had work appear in Cincinnati Review, New Ohio Review, Southern Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, and North American Review, among other journals. His first full-length collection, Our Best Defense, was published by Červená Barva Press in 2022.