Three Poems

DAY 30

Any routine is always the same but in between you could cut the space for my breastbone with a sword & fail to make contact with

When we walked together in the suburbs, in May, a single sparrow resonated in twenty-two different garages. The stink of apathy carried with it various remembered sparrows in other neighborhoods, like a stream.

(Most streams, I learned, regret the inability to stand still.)

The last sparrow I heard was your voice.

I am I in two moments but maybe not from one to the next.

The problem of continuity. The cat’s dead or out of the box.

One girl in front of a placemat. The same girl at the same time by the window of the spaceship on the mission to the end of the Universe (capital U). Her hair smells like snakeskin.

Play the scale for me like you used to, not lifting your hand from the keys.

DAY 72

In the logbook I try to focus on the tasks at hand

Listen, though; lately I have been thinking about death. About how the stuff out there may be smarter than we give it credit for.

Even a child would not step
toward a bed in the dark without considering
what might lie under it

(unbound)

[begin transmission]
the end of fear is the
end of both caution & imagination

the Big Rip-this whole shebang
overwhelmed & purple like a broken thumb

(dark energy creeping out
of boots, out of eyesockets & dogs’ tails, out of fathom
it fathom it the stems of )

Once you asked me what I would do if you died first

When I am quiet enough I think I can feel them:

two hands
pushing against
the body from the inside. one
against the belly, one against
the spine. as though
a tiny police officer
were directing
traffic in the guts

Stars will go first: gaseous confetti.

Then planets, curls of continents separating from the earth like a proper apple peel (the Universe always had such an appetite
for pie)

And then our own skin

From far away, a tiny effervescence.

Dear Martians,

can you ensure we’re not the only ones who bleed?

DAY 80

This evening I was supposed to measure the oxygen in the ship’s atmosphere, whether it fluctuated, if so how often. Looking at my watch, I began to count

One hour elapsed during that single minute, as it does when you are in the grip of a dream.

But awake. I could only ask the night,

When you’re strapped into the simulator, time works in the head like
a busted car, one whose gears can’t lock into place. The swing-the dip-the release.

I once wished to be reincarnated as a gun, but I meant to say bullet. Stone and mid-air.

Cutting into your flesh like the invisible band on an invisible

The busted car juking to a hard stop. When I say stop I mean:

Count to me, count to me.

Count the ways that my body could land in this net that I sometimes call night. Tighten the gears. Take the gag out of my brain’s mouth. We all know I’m less than complete