Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Breaking Down the Day
The morning on which you can worry
yourself to death
has come.
Negotiating the bathroom
is unintelligible. Eggs scrambled in
the smooth black crater
represent a relief map
of one place you could be going. So,
the bacon spits
in your face.
Over the stove you lean like a weathered oak.
And the grapefruit halved
on the chopping block
open their pink fibrous throats
to you, crooning:
come, make love with us
with your shivering tongue.
You hear the soft tremor
of an elephant cavalry plodding a
snow-covered path out of
the mountains.
Now you will forget nothing.
Even how it is to be drunk
by the earth
when night drapes her skirts over this forest,
this land slowly changing its name
to anything better.
Kirby Malone is abroad, writing, on a Watson Fellowship. (updated 1976)