A copy of the moon in your pocket but grown too small to fear. For these next few minutes, we must keep vigilant: Everything has to be just so. And with the sky split evenly—ten to every one of us—it may turn out OK after all. The world may transform peaceably in its orbit. I am, perhaps, a very large bird. It’s true I don’t like what my teeth do. And I know it's cliché, but who can even say this is living and not some perfect asshole's loving facsimile? Outside the gates of the city, it all gets so strange. Fistfights erupting in the water, pets in deep depressions. The rules will have to change—new methods invented, strengthened by wind. We’ll hash out the finer points later. Otherwise we just circle back to the car with no sign whether the mall guards follow to tinker with our irregular breaths or still creep about keeping jealous surveillance of our smallest velleities. I guess we just come to accept it: the klaxons at dusk, the day wadded up. But cup an ear to the street and you can hear children in the storm tunnels, advancing on the city…
however ambitious,
let’s make good on our plans
to button these shirts,
open these cans,
text back and forth,
water the plants,
and hold this heavy thing
between us
for the next thousand years.
Hamburger the infinity cove
and back to the program—
Who wants to see the world
from inside this horse?
It all happened so fast
I understood less than
the deer mice caught
in summered hexes—
Are they pieces of the moon?
They give off light and heat.
Still, when you hold out
your hand I hesitate, eyes
like two boys waiting
for a rollercoaster
behind a tall woman.
Ourselves to others, tall grasses.
Another cloud to the face.
These online quizzes know my current state
doesn’t match the portents
of indomitable beauty.
I want to be young and awkward again
as a homeschooler’s bang trim,
heart on the wrong foot,
thoughts tiny apples
left goldbricking in the sun’s heat.
“Oh, why’d you do this to my heart?”
asks the woeful ocelot.
“May I bite your back?”
a giddy tide replies.
And then it’s all normal sex.
Like nothing before or since.
A congratulatory basket.
A lesser known weather.
A back-ordered moon
and a backhanded grief.
It all finds a way in.
It all makes escapes
even if mauled by circus bears
with some regularity.
It all loses its car in parking lots.
It all falls asleep with its glasses on.
It takes embarrassingly long to tie its shoes.
But darling I love you.
And the phone is ringing all over us.