One Thing In One World
By Billy Malanga
There’s a voice that gets pulled
through the screen door, on a late
afternoon breeze as I sip my wine.
It retells of punctuality, anger and
unbending burden. It retells
of a time when being busy meant
pushing hard things further down
as normal.
The screw-ups and successes,
making it through the deadline years
for better or worse, then and now.
My steel armor has been removed.
I am older, grayer but less moved
by nonsense. I am not the same man,
he is gone. Now I stand in front
of a new world, a rich world
full of beauty and pain.
The voice gets pulled through
the screen door and I say to it,
I was one thing in one world, now I am
a new thing in another world.
–
Billy Malanga is a first generation college graduate, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and the grandson of Italian immigrants. His poetry reveals his small victories and also his struggles in redefining masculinity in an effort to better understand the beauty and brutality of the world around him. His recent poetry has been published or is forthcoming in: The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The Creativity Webzine, The Write Launch, The New Thoreau Quarterly Review, and other publications.
