Full

By Carson Phytell

Full men and found fight still an emptiness

fixed as foreboding of fallacious fulfilment.

Full men fight for fear of strictest form.

Found men fight strictly from fear.

It is emptiness the enemy of all

who recognize some in themselves.

And those who don't, they do for now.

How empty are empty rooms windowless?

Yet emptiness, sentience of

storms and showers, saturates

steadily, seeping in until one day

one finally finds their room flooded.

And if the politics, posies, parishes

explored provide no payload,

they leave an empty world with a full bang

and leave the full to whimper themselves empty.

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Carson Pytell is a writer living outside Albany, NY whose work has appeared in numerous venues online and in print, including Artifact Nouveau, The Virginia Normal, NoD Magazine, Rabid Oak and Bluepepper, among others. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Coastal Shelf, and his short collection, First-Year (Alien Buddha Press, 2020) and chapbook, Trail (Guerrilla Genesis Press, 2020) are now available. In December 2020 he is slated to participate in the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project.

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