The day after his myth

began, Icarus had to return

to the trophy bar to pick up

his credit card. This time molted,

reeking of cheap plastic,

feeling as though he crashed far

out in some floating

garbage patch. He fancies

he could establish himself there, ascend

instead of fall, become a ruler

of the discarded, unite a diffuse Elysium

whitecapped with trash. His one chance

 at deification, to insert himself

among the pantheon: imagine Icarus

a god, god of cautionary tales

and emasculated men.

*

He wonders if his father would sail

out into the ocean. If he would even know

what he was looking for in the disaster

Icarus left behind. If he would hammer

together an island, raw material

for a raw boy, forge a body

to mourn. Would he call it memorial, call it

by his name, mutter Icaria,

Icaria until it dissolves

into a song that could cusp

and ride the wind better

than his boy? Or would he just wait

for what the tide brings in.

*

This is not a dream of flight,

but a prophecy of vertigo. One sealed

in by the wax itself. A spotlight,

a windburn, a fading synthesizer syncopating

heat death. Call it entropic disco, call it

the danse macabre at the end

of the universe, call it simply

inevitable—he should have seen it

coming, no?—call it Icaria, a strobe

light beat flickering against

the bass of wings.

*

The bar dead but alive

with “Xanadu,” the bartender skates

in the eyeshadow of the bar

slicing limes, mouthing Olivia

Newton-John. Hey, you’re the one

that went home with Sunny last night,

right? And there it was, a waterlogged

memory of bodies flailing

again, unsure which was his.

Icarus doesn’t remember leaving, only a hook

through his cheek pulling him

out. How much he would have preferred

the line cut, leaving the hook to rust.

*

Icarus offers a maybe as he feels the wound

that could have been, tracing

his cheek until the imagined gash

feels as certain as his father’s

hands hanging over

his shoulders. Every father has placed their boy

in front of a bandsaw

with a decisive imperative: measure twice…, cut

until the blood calcifies the tongue

into a strikable vein of dark iron.

*

Discarded or kept, what a feast

Icarus would make.

He thinks he would prefer to be pan-

seared. But first someone would need to gut

the boy. Cut deep, leak the rust

water. Someone to admire

the knife bedazzled in irreducible

glitter. Icarus takes back the plastic 

and all that he’s worth.