Vincent Casaregola

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, and rhetorical studies at Saint Louis University. He has published poetry in a number of journals, as well as creative nonfiction, short fiction, and flash fiction. His poetry collection, Vital Signs (dealing with illness, loss, trauma, and grieving), is now available from Finishing Line Press.

Easy read of the poems in the images above:

Gender Reveal

Dangerous, perhaps even toxic,
these hyperbolic events to announce
the sex of the yet-to-be-born,
with elaborate pyrotechnics
to spread the colors blue or pink.

Read the news stories covering
the bitter ironies of causing death
to celebrate anticipated birth—
shrapnel kills a grandmother,
brush fires torch 47,000 acres,

and in one case, a plane crash.
We are making a big deal of this,
perhaps because we want, desperately,
to control outcomes, to know definitively
the basic Adam and Eve of the story.

Not that simple, though, with gender
evolving, shifting as the body or mind
evolves through the many moments
crafted by night-long questions
and days of multi-colored desires.

Hubris to think we know the future,
can determine all with a binary scheme,
so we risk folly to shape the present
in the current colors of our desire,
regardless of the wind or will of another.
More deadly, even, when the soul,

crafted by time, attempts to reveal
complexity of spirit in the simple shape
that once seemed fore-ordained—dangerous
to be the self that will not be confined.
On the bus to school, in the restroom
at work, at the sporting event, to call

out and reveal that splendid complication,
brings even worse blowback than shrapnel,
blows of fist and club, death for being.

Reveals are a dangerous performance,
and in explosion and smoke we self-destruct,
but worse yet the weapons in hateful hands,
intolerant of difficulty, of complexity,
would reduce us all to fragments and to dust.

Complications

Nothing in life is simple, really,
all passages of time, all points of reference
become entangled with others, connected,
like particles in the quantum realm.

Life schools you to learn the intricacies
even when you cannot follow each one
to its cluttered ends, frayed and awkward.
Once you sat in neat desks, in neat rows

in the place that spoke of learning, scented
with chalk dust and the awkwardness of children,
but each rounded head, each crew-cut or ponytailed
scalp and skull was not the simple geometry

of body and mind, the easy binary sums,
the up and down, the yes and no, verb and noun.
Tendrils of thought complexities, of fantasies
grew from each mind, each soul, even

as they knew not what they longed for,
knew nothing of costs and benefits of desire.
The great arc from simple childhood rooms,
with their easy illusions of time and order,

leads to inevitably more complicated ends,
patterns more intricate and infinite than
the cosmic microwave background,
faint as distant stars, blurred with cosmic dust.

Now lined up in assisted living or long-term care,
children again for all their needs of body
and mind, and waiting for the lunch hour,
and for the hour of release, for vacation, too,

which comes now as darkness, not summer light.
Not even death is simple, the fluttered thoughts,
the sudden chills, the labored breath of fearful hope,
all a blur of sensations we cannot place,

of purposes we cannot recall, and some item
we have misplaced or task left incomplete,
until the heart calls “enough,” and attendants
call an end, listed as “complications” of a life.