First Frost, New York

Continually, as October weeds out the majority of false Edens, the hollow Eve finds us sweet teeth bobbing for apples. Scratch us so we can start over, so we can turncoat through iron-maiden turnstiles. Crosstown ride where the Lord give uth and take uth away, flasher whose jimson got jammed in slamming doors. We might miss an apocalyptic eclipse, but the river-frontiers burst in the Eerie Canals. House and Garden Reader’s headphones corkscrewed as snakes whisper out, get the hell.

Michael Tyrell is a poet living in New York. His poems have appeared in Agni, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn.