The Belles of the Ball

Human life is a case of nuclear waste,
festering and buried deep beneath
Minnesota’s Iron Range, where it
waits to sprout mineral wings.

The sound of their tinny nourishment
beat destruction down on everything
that was and now isn’t. Nothing left
living at least nothing actually breathing.

Earth’s orbiting satellites jest “Sic”
semper tyrannis,” having witnessed
the end of a natural habitat. They’re
left to bask in independence,

taste their metallically bonded
tongues and laugh and laugh and
yet, Man’s memory lives on still
in the corporeal nostrils

of the lake’s dry shores whose
inhalation of the fallout radiates
consistent in the forever long
and sordid winter.

The satellites observe these
no-longer-spoken borders where,
above them, dimly lit monitors
click and klack meditatively…

The crags of once great lakes
cast shadows on their depth.
The hypocenters echo the
spirit of a dying planet

awestruck by its sole
inorganic inhabitants.

Alexandra

My dog is sick and will die soon. Bone cancer is eating her leg.
My father took her on a long car ride to taylor's falls (way out in the styx) where the MN metropolitan highschoolers go to jump the cliffs into the river. My brother said Alex stuck her head out the window the whole ride there and back. My dad remembered when Henry and I were little and played minigolf nearby at gooseberry falls. Henry was losing and quit playing, saying the game wasn't fair. Alex is older now than he was then. She still has a couple more days until she can quit.
I remember rolling up my jeans and wading into the shallows of the falls, slippery and sharp rocks uncomfortable to my always shoed toes. The water rolled over my ankles and ushered me to take the plunge over nearby precipices. I could never bring myself to make the jump.
I always passed out during the scenic ride home, long before my head could hang out any window. Car rides always put me to sleep; the rhythmic movements, the pulse of the road lulling my muscles to relaxation helping me to leave behind my active heartbeat and full breaths that characterize the necessary silent portion of existence.

OnLYme

I have made one single decision,
which is the decision to make decisions.
Societal-neural incisions and implants cannot do more than supplant ideas into the recipient.
Cognito. Ergo sum? Ergo a societal mirror reflects each and every one of us. Or is this just what we assume when we declare God is making fun of us?
If we are all the bathroom rugs in the cosmic pisser,
where does the slime we slither between us come from?
Furthermore, do you love this rug just for where I have been, or for my slimy intellectual influences contained within?
Why is that that in the bed of a structuralist I dreamed of you telling me 'there IS original thought' all the while seeing it through the pen I just bought?
You wrote of how you knew what it was like to be dead,
among inklings of angels on the back of a gum wrapper in a Harriet prison-of-the-head
Which is to speak of knowing the difference between life and not-
The world creating for the world forgot.

Knowledge

Like a ton of pavement
Washed up and liquid
Spiraling
Toward its inevitable conclusion
Unearthed grass and cigarette butts
Ripple beneath the street.

The train tracks
Used to go North and South
To other destinations
That meant something else
But their buried too
And spread out

Closer and closer
Now
They barrel to the center
Of the city
Away from Lake Michigan
To the middle of the prairie

The knowledge underneath
Years of erosion
And modernity
(the decomposing animals,
bones blood stained,
thornberry paved streets and...)

Yeah,
We got it now.
A global community
That reaches away
From the Great Lakes
To Everything

Where it comes back
Again though the oceans
Can’t be colonized
And the larger bodies
Of water can’t be
Renamed

This society flies
Over on zero
And one
Wing…

We’re all Living
Together on this
Old prairie

And we,
We can see
Everything

There's a pigeon in the prayer house

There's a pigeon in the prayer house
and we're not wearing shoes.
I'm biting my tongue
on a floor of blue carpet,
under a dome painted blue.
The doors to the decks are open
and the sky is turning grey.
It's no wonder then:
a pigeon in the prayer house.