Bryce Emley | Non-Small Cell

It’s my first time in a real dive: dimly lit, Willie lilt, cue-ball-scuffed floor, basket of condoms by the door. I ask what they’ve got and stop her when she gets to Schlitz.

Before I clack the can open I conjure my father sneaking The Beer that made Milwaukee Famous into an Oral Roberts dorm,

swigging it mid-June Oklahoma storm from the driver seat

of his first Austin-Healey,

dwelling in that space of time he lived the stories he tells.

Bitter, tinny, it tastes like college beer.

Hemorrhage paralyzed him at 43. He’s 64 now. He doesn’t drink.

Every year is a stroke toward a closing surface,

a swimming out of the wreck,

the thing itself bluing into myth beneath.

The next round I take an AmberBock, and it tastes like it did in the Applebee’s on University all those times.

Two Pompeiis

In every living city the haunted ruin

—Robert Pinsky

I’d like to think they didn’t see it coming—

denarii left on counters like quarters on a dresser,

bodies bound in awful contortion,

arms clung around Fortuna medallions—

but the tremors in the earth a week before

that shook their bones in god-like warning

while they pressed and jarred wine

grown and named on what would bury them,

their doors inscribed with Salve, lucru

ruin that tragedy, build us a new city still

haunted by a decadence for us to marvel at

as tourists and let ash and time conceal.

ii.

I’d like to think we didn’t see it coming—

our two bodies like bills wadded on a dresser,

too bound in painless contortion for us to grasp

that we had clung to what wouldn’t save us—

but how could we not have felt the tremors

in our bones branching through marrow

as we pressed tongues and fingers,

buried ourselves beneath ourselves,

our end always inscribing itself

in our skin, ruined from our start

by the decadence of flesh, the baggage

we carried as tourists in each other’s countries.

Non-Small Cell

What should we gain by a definition . . .?

—Ludwig Wittgenstein

It could be large,

maybe medium, basically

whatever just isn’t small.

One-fifth who have it last

another five years—

after that, some other statistic.

Nine times more common than small,

more women than men,

smokers and nonsmokers,

occasion for the one cigarette

lying dormant

in a drawer.

Clinical pamphlet,

Harvard doctor,

quick Google search—

some terms we can only define

by fissures branching our chests,

creating the loss by our knowing them.

Bryce Emley is a freelance writer and MFA student at NC State. His poetry can be found in Mid-American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Cortland Review, Your Impossible Voice, etc. He’s on staff for Raleigh Review and BULL: Men’s Fiction and blogs about advertising at advertventures.wordpress.com.