Kyle Seamus Brosnihan is a Filipino-American poet, playwright, and currently an MFA candidate in Poetry at Brooklyn College. He is the Arts Editor for the Brooklyn Review. His poetry has been published in Hobart, The Mantle, Interpret Magazine, Always Crashing, Boston Accent Lit, and elsewhere. His poem "Martha" was voted Poem of the Year by the Brooklyn Poets in 2020. His first full-length play, The Performance, premiered off-Broadway in March of 2020. His work was longlisted for Frontier Poetry’s 2021 Award for New Writers.
2 poems
by Kyle Seamus Brosnihan
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Andy
I am a deeply superficial person.
I like boring things, think everybody
should like everybody.
Sex is more exciting
on the screen and
between the pages than sheets.
The most exciting thing
is not doing it. If you fall in love
with someone
and never do it,
a good picture
is one that’s in focus and of a famous person.
I love Los Angeles,
and I love Hollywood.
They are beautiful.
Everybody is plastic. I love plastic.
When I got my first television set,
I stopped caring so much
about having close relationships.
People sometimes say the way
things happen in movies is unreal,
but actually, it’s the way
things happen to you in real
life that’s unreal.
The same lunch, every day, for twenty years.
They should have movies in restaurants.
I can’t believe so many people get together
just to sit there. Isn’t it abstract?
What are these people watching?
Joan
I want to make a surface work.
Sunflowers are like
people to me
I carry my landscapes around,
paint for me and my dogs.
We are in the studio
and they watch.
I don’t like fields
of sunflowers. I like them alone.
It’s a still place
like one word, one image—
a feeling about
lake michigan,
not a style.