Tiny Reprieves
There’s a goldfinch walking in the road
daring cars to brake.
Highways with faded yellow guardrails
cutting through selfish mountains
that want our dangerous love
all to themselves.
Hidden baseball fields
kept up by forgiving grazing goats
and water from ex-holy tarns.
On the way, we swerve around sweepers
with spinning splintered wire brushes
that make us think of couples therapy:
We’re running from empty pantries.
Forest fires we may have started.
A green hydrant on the curb
by a graffiti’d downtown warehouse
and redacted versions
of National Geographic stacked
on end tables in relationship oncology
waiting rooms everywhere,
making us the numbest of numb
before figuring out what dinosaur
we can be for the kids and also
still come back as oil.
Interpreting Weightlessness
If everyone on the Chemical Destruction Community Advisory Board is us
(and everyone on the board is us)
then when we stand charred and disfigured in front of the bench,
we are the gallery, the photographers, the chairman declaring
the last weapons were destroyed too late anyways.
And when our priest smears us in the press
we are the reporter, the delivery boy, and the ink.
And when all our terminal velocities happen at once,
we think of ourselves not as softgels falling into a clear blue glass,
not just as throats opening, eyes watering like a hydrograph
finally becoming aware of its own flows.
No, we think of ourselves as the plunge too,
not the shove before the plunge, or the black
that will come after, not the tiny-looking people spiraling within
the withholding clouds, nor the clouds themselves.
We are the arch, the just-wait, the verb as we swell
and somewhere the wind slams a door.
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