No Longer Other

30 August, 2007

When I was little,
death did not happen to me.
It was on the list of things
that happened to other people I did not know well:
divorce, cancer, fire, torture, and virgin births.
Death happened to distant great uncles
and someone else's fish.
Death was like the Morgans' backyard pool:
they had one, and we did not.
Now death lives in that space
where they removed my uterus and sewed me shut,
forever cutting off the path
from inside me to outside me.
It presses itself over the scar I will never see,
a cat that lies on the newspaper,
drawn to it by attention.

From This End

2 August, 2007

I sleep six days for every one I open my eyes.
I take pictures and then run three days from the source.
Fiction fixes place in time when fact is fleeting,
and all reality's a vanishing point
at the end of a long line of roadside poles.

At least that's how it appears
on the other end of a pen, a lens,
from behind a particular pair of binoculars,
in the news and financial reports,
on the calendar three Sundays from now
where the crow goes long.