Flavorfest, Sparkle Supreme, Seascape, Eversweet
I can’t remember the words. Something
about you lifting your cup of light to mine.
A new sun switching on between us.
It was good however it went. I slipped it
into your phone case. I’ll still be asleep.
You’re preparing for work. I want you
to think of this passing strip malls with
their signs removed so there’re just holes
where the plates once fit, holes where
power cords came through, haloes where
dirt caught around the plastic. How does
dirt get up there? Does it actually fall
on us? Things are getting worse they say.
I don’t remember them having gotten better
since last time they got worse. A blue tarp
over the back of a drug store lights
the pavement Pacific Atlantic Arctic—
I’m listing oceans it makes me think of.
Sea animals shaped like a funnel with
other animals inside taking refuge or
being eaten. Last night—let’s agree
to call it midnight—I went to swat
a spider with America’s Most Complete
Seed and Nursery Catalog. As I swung
the strawberries at the wall, the thing
jumped out over my right shoulder.
I lost it against the carpet pattern,
the blossoms I walk across to get to you.
How Many Exoplanets Will It Take
You mentioned the starlings last weekend
as if they were nothing, as if they needed to
get some butter the next time they were out.
I saw the various stars after you’d gone to bed
and I stepped outside to see what the trees
were doing. I wanted to act as if I’d never seen
them before. There are lights. In the sky.
Like rings pressed into black velvet. Trays
laid on folding tables in a cosmic flea market.
I wanted to reach out—I wanted to be
the kind that reaches out. If they knock
the seed to the ground it won't go to waste.
Chipmunks will fatten. Something will feed
off the chipmunks. In your sleep—overtime
each day this week and looking at working
straight through the weekend—when you shift
a limb or change your breathing a pain sound
bleats out of you. At full volume. I find myself
thinking, the worms are waking in the soil,
but I don’t know that they are. Perhaps like us
they’re alive all winter long. Occasionally
come close enough to the snow to think
the sky is a blank and appears to want us
dead. We’re wrong about what’s going on.
We’re small and our smallness confuses us.
Pinkies and Stumpies
People will keep arriving for the garage sale
even if the rain returns. There’s a fierce drive
deep within, not where the heart dwells but
beside it, like a wolf waiting. It looks like a dog.
It’s not a dog. What are you? Third grade we lay
on long paper while some kid traced around us.
Supposed to draw the organs in later. I asked
teach, Where is the meat? Does it matter
I can’t remember her answer? That year
I learned cause means what made it happen,
not because even though when I said it it did.
Deep shadows in the hallways around that room
felt like a relief. Everything’s too brightly lit.
We’re not all about to operate. Here’s where
I’ll put the heart. Here’s my shoes. I could sit
in a room plugged into you for hours without
getting hungry. I’d have to stretch my legs
eventually. That’s something that’s lasted.
One man’s junk is another’s treasure. My
mom said this to me as we climbed across
a hill of refuse at the town dump. She’s gone
and that’s one of the things I miss about her.
She'd cook two kinds of mushrooms my dad
and I picked wild in the woods. The others,
though he felt they were fine, she wouldn’t touch.
Sautéed in butter, my brothers freaked for them.
I wouldn’t swallow any—they smelled like dirt.
So she placed a bowl of ice cream before me,
the cheap kind in brown, white, and strawberry
that’s the best thing in the world until it isn’t.
