Milkweed Editions

We’ll say unbelievable things
to each other in the early morning—

She sends me an article from a recent National Geographic that says,

Sharks bite fewer people each year than
New Yorkers do, according to Health Department records.

Then she sends me on my way. Into the City of Sharks

Reader, I want to
say: Don’t die. Even when silvery fish after fish
comes back belly up, and the country plummets
into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still
something singing?

I plant three seeds
As a spell. One
For what will grow
Like air around us,
One for what will
Nourish and feed,
One for what will
Cling and remind me—
We are the weeds.

I saw a mom take her raincoat off
and give it to her young daughter when
a storm took over the afternoon. My god,
I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her
raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel
that I never got wet.

I’m here waiting for something to happen to me.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What
would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain
for the safety of others, for earth,
if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,
if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,
rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

a mouth of terrible red,
like a tongue that’d been bitten so often it was not a tongue
but a bloody wound with which the earth tried to speak