Sitting in Bathwater at 1am
As a child, I spent hours in the tub
playing with dinosaurs, imagining
them swimming to islands without
comets or the impacts that life so often
envelopes on our fragile bodies. No fossils,
no future petroleum, just hydrogen and oxygen
feeding illusions. Our programmed neocortex
in perpetual creation. In water, I can be
contradictions, simultaneously at peace and
turbulent. I can be the humpback whale’s song
traveling miles past fishermen’s nets to an
open current or thunderous waves crashing
on the shores of my fears. Sometimes, when
I remember my father’s last breath,
I wish I could change nature by punching
a wall or the wind. Reconstruct atoms in
such a way that when the sky weeps,
his lungs transform into diamonds or
moissanite, but the heart would remain
as gentle as the hairs on a butterfly’s wing.
Some memories cleanse like soapsuds
on wet skin, some hold you in a petri dish under
a microscope, and some force you to collapse
beneath the aching pressure of the deep ocean.
Cocoon
Summer 2020 August was like a butterfly in a box.
Colorful patterned wings pound
against cardboard.
What happened to spring Mountain sunset transitions to
food deliveries and ventilators.
Panopticon Protestors refusing to wear masks,
but once removed never see all the other
masks that hide their faces.
Heat wave Blossoms scatter sidewalks,
street dogs lie in shade,
in the background, an elderly
woman prays. Dust.
Nothing cleanses the body We picked up stones on Uzunya Beach,
like stars collected memories, built a tornado
from regrets.
Fill my bowl with ambiguity Routine is an isolated white cabin
on a barren hillside with little to
pass the time.
Post-secretion Club-tipped antennae, wings vertical
over back. If hope exists, why must it
stay hidden among the constellations?
Flight I place an envelope between two pages
in an Oxford Dictionary, turn off the
ceiling fan, open the front door.
Maybe today will be different.