The Beginning

Every black morning I wake up
On the broken neck of this weary loop —
The curled up road bear cub,
Eating blueberries that seep
A deep-sea kind of fog exhaust,
Like the valves of this city,

Like the breath holes
In the cracked, caving mantle.
All mornings are mirrors.
A smoker’s subtle ongoing cough
From the velvety-rotting underground
Steams up the car window.

Then once a year, the flatlining sky
Is injected with acid green;
It clogs up my throat
Like a sooted industrial pipe

And all I see
Is through a plastic wrap,
And all I hear
Is through murky water,
And I feel corpses
Floating up against my thighs,

But I focus on the in and the out
And the way that it spreads
And the way that it stops,
Like it’s force kicked with fascist’s boots.
Skilled gloves punch it back down —
And the balloon is stuck.

I sleep the same vignette every night
And I swim the same overflowed bay
And my fingers are covered in salt
And sawdust. She wrung a cheesecloth
Into the ceramic of the sky...
It’s all I can remember.

As we drift past the silhouetted statues,
Bobbing heavily like a planet
In the thickness of the atmosphere,
I fall asleep with the city a million times.
Nothing changes and they’re still there:
No one to find a patch of firm virgin soil

To bury them, no one to find a voice
In the birches, with their shawled necks
Hacked down, to sing funeral service.
This place has been sealed off
For a thousand years; right in the center
I hatched and drew half a breath.