Copyright © 2024 Otis Nebula Press. All rights reserved.
The City Is
sustained by buildings
never entered (paper supply church dry cleaning
that stay themselves amid
the shifting and the tearing down.
We’d hole up there with
a can of mountain dew, claw
the walls and survive,
eating the past out from under our nails.
There was an appliance repair with a bathtub
in the front yard
that would fill with every season
(leaves snow rain light
They tore my school down around a brand
new fire escape. It stood there days after leading
from the sky back to safety.
She left and took the walls.
He died, and with him the sky
from which there is now
no such
escape.
The kids are eating their nails down to the blood.
What choice but to tie the refrigerator
tight to the roof of the car?
What garden now but morning on the road?
Never Sleeps
The delivery trucks next
to which you stand
so small
will be buried to their axles in the earth.
Slow swallow.
You’ll see.
You’ll learn the dirt
that chews metal
and has rust on its tongue.
You couldn’t do with an axe
what it’s done to the tires
of the great mechanism,
great giver and breaker of lives.
You’ll never see the gears
rusting in the under-
carriage the earth
reclaims what was never
its own
and sends its own on
colt legs up toward
the sun.
Rights to Remain
Arresting to watch
the graphs
(on paper
The jagged peaks before
the plunge, sudden
and of currency
(now
and people are caged
for lesser crimes
than its valleys.
(murder
Something Somewhere
about dwelling in
the valley
(the shadow
earthen gospel of walls
against wind
(crumbling into
hair blown across
the child’s face
(a violence
watching,
under arrest.
(Of morning
Andrew Baron is distinguished poet in residence at the Rose City post office in Portland, Oregon (self-appointed). His Substack is called No Currency: A Practice of Words.
photo: Henry Cherry