Steven D. Schroeder

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Listen to Steven D. Schroeder read his piece:

When we first saw beneath
each other’s clothes, we knew it
made us superheroes. We mutated
lava into love and vice versa.
Conjured by our kisses, binding
contracts demanded we seal
the deal daily. We sealed letters
under adamantium and antarctic
but still didn’t hide our secret
identities in the signatures,
Sugarbomb and Hugaton.
With our gifts, we manufactured
stellar pornography and graphs
of our momentum and place
in space-time. Then we settled
into a rental unit with central air,
where relight the pilot was no longer
an entendre for our talents.
The ability to double sunrises
with sexiness cooled into a knack
for baking cookies sooooo goooood,
the neighbors said. While playing
Tedium one Friday game night,
the Answerer, who foresaw a future
of same nights counted out
as cutlery, guessed nothing but
zip and void. The inevitable breakup
of the universe soon followed.
Impotent to stop it, we froze
home movies on that frame
where it became clear how special
effects allowed us to appear
on fire again. We crossed our eyes
out with booze to unsee the why
science couldn’t reason. At the end
of dating diaries, we found our power
was wishing we could turn
the planet backward to before
our flames transformed to former.

Steven D. Schroeder’s second book, The Royal Nonesuch, is forthcoming from Spark Wheel Press in Fall 2013. His poetry is available from New England Review, Pleiades, Verse, and Indiana Review. He edits the online poetry journal Anti- and works as a certified professional résumé writer.