My Apartment Is a Great Lung

My apartment is a great lung,

expanding, contracting.

It is fit to collapse

and suffocate its sole occupant.

I am the wet nurse of the deformed creature Solitude,

alimenting fears of pustulous bedbugs that lurk

behind every corner and in every crevice,

waiting to overcome me as I lay sleeping.

I let the creature suckle at the bosom of dissatisfaction.

There is no true living here:

I force no sighs of love nor peals of laughter

within my bronchial abode tuberculous.

My alveolar accoutrements fall to disrepair:

the desk lamp flickers, the pleura-wallpaper peels away

revealing the abscesses of a battered chest wall.

This apartment is a great lung,

failing as I have failed

to raise the monstrous child above its misery,

to extend a hand out for succor.

And so we side-by-side are doomed to suffocate.

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Raymond Turco's debut chapbook, Rays of Light and Darkness, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2024. A poet and playwright from New Jersey, he writes in both English and Italian. The author of nine stage plays, his poetry has appeared in The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, and with Bordighera Press, among others. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Cliffside Park Arts Association as its Director of Literature and is passionate about European history, surrealism, magical realism, and absurdism—all central influences in his work.