Running far away from a city, to return a week later.
It begins at the front door jigsaw peppermint puzzle,
where eyes are the black marble bustle and everyone is
full of strawberry ice cream and hot, hot, hot dogs.
Your mother and I were just traveling with the flock,
like fireflies in love with electric lights,
compelled towards sticky, sticky, sticky, letters.
On vacation, trees were colorful, flexible, blind.
It was so subtle that it drew cold tears.
Downstairs I was peeling scabs in bed,
beating monarch butterflies to the wilderness
of old oil barges off the coast.
We are carefree, son—daughter.
You’ve learned it yourselves,
learned to build up until you are soaring,
learned to speak out before the scream of the shrink,
learned to build bits until your psychologists
just reduce… reduce to rubble, rubble, rubble.
This poem originally appeared in The Grave of the Great Alley of Clarity Cats, an anthology of poetry written by Mike Giardina. The complete the anthology is available below:
Table of contents:
- Sun Shine Body
- On arrival in a lot of no civilization and plenty of letters,
- The unable to deliver
- An upwards slanted walk
- A familiar voice
- Those who have a standard way of going
- Left each chapter within us
- Warm smile not found in her cigarette
- To regain his composure for figures
- Food for rejecting his feet
- Even during--even if it during
- Lying on the floor, stretched after stir
- A soldier frames the wall
- A step by boulder
- A train by life station
- I was able to take the old north of town
- Fledgling
- Job
- Bradbury's closet
- A mummy's leggings
- Sipping mother's sweat
- Flash like an individual there
- I realize the skyline while playing catch with mother's death
- Running far away from a city, to return a week later
- Dysmorphexia
- Carried the clock over
- We have been meeting years
- Chocolate Italian princess
- Champion of Years
- "How much longer will I be able to remount the mothproof thrusting..."
- Over as rivers are over