the train

 

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headlights

new deer learn not to cross here

 

fawn sure don't look like good eating

mangled round the engine

grass daffodils still

 

(he couldn’t hit the brakes fast enough

was told:

don’t hit the brakes at all

we can’t afford a break)

 

this don’t look good to eat

but the kids’ll scrape it off anyway

 

maybe the foxes are hungry

or maybe they're letting ghosts out

 

we never came to kill

anything beautiful

only sometimes

there’s a side effect to ambition

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Night Terrors

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so we adjust to darkness

     heartrate up, 190

and my mom on the phone

     “Ava, Ava, Ava”

   it means bird, self fulfilling prophecy

   the fates never said which one

so I unfurl, wings still wet from birth

      to be an eagle or a crow

      eyes opened to open fire

this country as a night terror

            repeating

I wet the bed, momma

            every night, every century

 

we have not yet changed his sheets

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resurrection conception*

 

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to recur as a face

on the long way back home

past the hollyhock bridge and night blooming flower

to turn somethingnothingsomething

all your particles buzzing out at once

is to deaden into ghostlore

 

did you know that once inside a chrysallis

a caterpillar completely dissolves

then reconstructs with same memories

 

our bodies dissolve and we recoil the same

I have tried walking through walls

and I am still hopeful

 

I have tried talking with ghosts

and I am still hopeful

 

I have closed my eyes

and thought myself gone

and I’m pretty sure it worked

 

I have seen 21st century

suffocation on screen, sad music apology

the dance of the night emerging

before us, the last gasp or the kickback

 

this is a case of disappearance

I am looking for return

 

 

*1st line taken from Under the Day by W.S. Merwin