what I tell you about circuit boards and snow,

I say to my jittery metal friends. I know waiting

is a hand closing slowly around needle

points, but we need the patience of a frozen sea.

Sometimes those words quiet the machines,

the hum gets easier to ignore. But pine needles

still fall gold. Dead trees creak. A rain-gutter sea waits,

machine-gray, and my throat begs to drink the snow.

Ask What I’ve Been

Ask What I’ve Been

I think cast stiff

around ankle, plaster poured

into a chest-shaped mold.

I think wet cement.

I say stone, and you think pebble

in stream or marble

fountain or kimberlite.

I say gravel or grave

or ask me later. There are days

I mourn being built

from this. Made

of so much aggregate

and gravestone, so little

diamond and fountain water.

When I was a construction

crane, my balled fists

toppled buildings of boys,

I rifled through the pockets

of their ruins.

Ask what I’ve been. Detroit

is a stretch of highway littered

with windshield,

a boy picking the remains

of a window from his hair.

I say Detroit;

you think glass.

I say glass; you think atrium;

I say atrium beams

warped by heat;

think cathedral. My shoe soles

say stain. Glass between treads,

treads imprinted on gum.

Everything finds its bottom,

say the sewers.

Don’t come any closer,

begs a map of collapsed veins,

while the burnt-out colonial,

this empty lot,

this alley-dark cavity

all say the shelter is sparse, yes,

but there is space here for bones—

a ribcage, brimming like yours.

Recent Titles from Alice James Books

Viral, Suzanne Parker

We Come Elemental, Tamiko Beyer

Obscenely Yours, Angelo Nikolopoulos

Mezzanines, Matthew Olzmann

Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books, Edited by Anne Marie Macari and Carey Salerno

Black Crow Dress, Roxane Beth Johnson

Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, A Reading by Ilya Kaminsky and Jean Valentine

Tantivy, Donald Revell

Murder Ballad, Jane Springer

Sudden Dog, Matthew Pennock

Western Practice, Stephen Motika

me and Nina, Monica A. Hand

Hagar Before the Occupation | Hagar After the Occupation, Amal al-Jubouri

Pier, Janine Oshiro

Heart First into the Forest, Stacy Gnall

This Strange Land, Shara McCallum

lie down too, Lesle Lewis

Panic, Laura McCullough

Milk Dress, Nicole Cooley

Parable of Hide and Seek, Chad Sweeney

Shahid Reads His Own Palm, Reginald Dwayne Betts

How to Catch a Falling Knife, Daniel Johnson

Phantom Noise, Brian Turner

Father Dirt, Mihaela Moscaliuc

Pageant, Joanna Fuhrman

The Bitter Withy, Donald Revell

Winter Tenor, Kevin Goodan

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