Art of Sinking
Pain
is for fools who let failure
keep them down,
she said.
But darling
drown a piano
in a pond and see if it aches
to be salvaged. Rescue it
from the glass-eyed fish
squirming through its metal
strings, nibbling its many mallets,
pull
this wooden burden from the
dreary depths.
Paint chips
and algae smudges
define it now, like the scars
of a beached whale. Water
streaming between the
keys—play it!—Tell me after its shipwreck symphony,
after your fingertips found their pearlescent
home on the brittle bone ivory,
tell me its
song isn’t somehow more soothing.
C.T. Salazar is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at the Mississippi University for Women. He's currently residing in Columbus, Mississippi where he's the Children's Librarian at his local public library and the host of regular poetry and spoken word open mics. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Tampa Review, Miles to Go, The Clarion Ledger, and elsewhere.