center

mountains blaze, trees candled into brief avatar explode
       as we breathe an invisible future’s scent yet
                                 watch hope’s green grass
grown thick as morning once again

The president called and ordered Greenland. As usual there was a bad connection on Maui, so I thought he said Foodland and picked up a dozen eggs. I texted a pic to the prez who exploded in anger.

A lumpy couch squatted in one of the corners. Someone had tossed a thin blanket and a pillow on top of it. Otherwise, the living room was devoid of furniture. Darlene pointed towards the couch. “You three can fight over who gets to sleep there. Otherwise, the floor is available. I’m off to bed.”

The flight from Seattle to Paris was in autumn but we were exhausted, broke and travel weary, seeking the shelter of our makeshift English base, not the euphoria of Paris.  We could be turned back or detained and deported.

Life is not the absence of decay, but its recursive integration—always bordering on its own putrefaction. Endling is alien not because it is unintelligible, but because it resists anthropocentric domestication.

rooted between this or that
uprooted tree of life lumbered
coffins for assassinated verbs
buried in graveyard of nouns

Slowly fed
Into the mouth
Of the MRI
As if a hostage
Slipped into a cave

Digger quietly cleaned up the torn dirt, replaced bits of bone as he could and buried others, telling no one of his actions or the causes. He had come into the habit of wandering the graveyard in the evening, listening for the scraping sound of tooth on bone.

we live among
hallowed walls of gray stone, these
ideals built upon the moraines that are
testaments of the sanctity of Life
eager for its taste of Liberty

“What are you two trying to prove?  You are MADE MEMBERS of the College of Cardinals. And what did you do to deserve such an honor?  Being related to me.  Don’t fo’get it!”