Sedimentary

Take Heart, Table 12

The loneliness becomes metaphysical.
You are now your very own blackhole,
swallowing the pizza but also the self.
Your chest cavity loops eternally,
like the terms of your singularity,
the number of pages you’ll read 

—which is, you have to admit, 
inversely proportional to 
the pairs of eyes you bother to meet— 

in books written by people 
who do not have answers for you.

The waitress calls you “sweetheart.”
She sees the celestial bits 
slide into your pupile abyss 
and fade into the wet dark. 
She is a former cosmonaut. 
She refills your Coke
again and again and again.

What You Call Apple

The garbage truck moans like a whale as it lumbers down the street. Some small children and stubborn adults think a whale is a fish, but a whale has a patch of hair on its chin or wherever and dammit, that makes it a mammal. Mammal or no, a whale is a whale, and a tomato tastes like a tomato, and the garbage truck is a marine animal swimming down the street.

S/f/31

The woman could not decide about bugs: precious or pestilence? She raided the house before work, and returned in the golden afternoon to floorboards ringed with crunchy bodies. She fell to her knees and sobbed, sobbed, sobbed. The house filled with salt water that carried the angels further away.

The Knighting

I could sum the faith in one verse: “I will call those who were not my people, my people, and her who was not beloved, beloved.”

And as with men, RSS subscribers, award committees, the Book fell short, and I wondered, “who will call me worthy? Who shall prop up these brittle bones and say, yes, good, you are fit to live?”

I forgot to be a self-king, and more: to point in all directions and declare, “worthy, wonderful, precious, loved.”

Tiny Propellers

Behind the house is a creek where many children learned to swim. “Git in the crick!” a father would yell, and the children would thunder through the shallows, sink for a moment in the deeps, and bob back up like a cork, because resurfacing was necessary. Once every few years, a child would not come up with the others. Everyone would be sad but no one was surprised because the drowning boy had teeny peg legs. The village parents would yell from the bank, “be strong!” And the glassy water would not break.