Two Palaces
Vincent Hostak
September 3, 2023
Live out your life in another’s light?
Some would on a Sunday morning
where the soundtrack’s a long lingering postlude.
A bishop clasps some trembling hands
for a short spell
and the believers shuffle into chaste sunlight.
The matinee’s another calling
Starlight trapped inside a lamphouse
the first reel trawls over the sound drum, clacking
like a freight line over cross grades
just blocks away—
melodies the projectionist alone can hear.
On the palace Uptown’s two dark days
the front-of-house is ghostly still,
mice nurse the canvas bags of dry sweet corn.
But soon a call: “Retreat stage left”
curtains part, make
way for a block-wide head to cross the chalk-faced screen.
Vincent Hostak is a writer and media producer from Texas now living near the Front Range of Colorado south of Denver. His recently published poems are found in the journals Sonder Midwest and the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas and as a contributor to the TPA. He writes & produces the podcast: Crossings-the Refugee Experience in America.
