Fever Dream: An Interlude

Back to blankets, back down

Welcome, and a warm first hello to the newcomers!

I’m so happy you’re here.

Normally, these Sunday poetry collections are based on a tarot card, but last week I was down for the count with a virus, and it seemed like time to take a rest from the usual routine.

Special note: I am heartbroken by the wildfires in LA right now, but I’m financially powerless to assist relief efforts, and I live too far away to use my own hands to help. So:

If you enjoy my poetry, and you have the means, please consider making a contribution to World Central Kitchen. It’s hard to know where to begin in a crisis, but I think filling hungry bellies is as good a place as any.

That being said,

May I present: four poems I wrote from inside a fever.

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Contents:

1. More Stairs Than God Intended

2. New Year’s Eye

3. Early-Sweets

4. Survivors

MORE STAIRS THAN GOD INTENDED

Stay down.
More blankets.
But wait,
Have to hydrate.
Jeans, house keys,
Sky-blue mask across my mug,
A dizzy walk past soda rainbows.
Guilt that my eyes ache too much to smile at the cashier.
Ginger ale and red Gatorade into a bag I brought from home,
Because surely my tote will stop the world from burning.
Surely these drinks will stop my head from hurting.
Dream-drift home on city sidewalks,
Up more stairs than God intended,
Back to blankets,
Back down. 

NEW YEAR'S EYE

Drag the pen a bit too long and
You get New Year’s Eye:
A facial expression most often found before the light. 
A midnight stare, intent.

A New Year’s Eye will fix upon a single point:
It cannot function unfocused.
No scintillating color-blooms will send it off its course.
The iris is all shades. 

We start just how we’re made,
All factory settings,
Then life annotates us, rich novels that we are. 
The pen just drags sometimes. 

EARLY-SWEETS

The city is as quiet as the country at this hour:
The interlude between shift-changes holds certain power. 

An astronaut floats just above the surface of the moon.
She radios to her comrades: improbable flower. 

Trains do not chuckle along tracks: this is their time of rest,
Stentorian horns pause from causing good men to cower.

Silence pushes inward on the drums. There is no beat here,
This is a tacet movement in the piece. Quiet now, pure. 

Dream-sidewalks crunch from the cold. Astigmatism scatters
The stars above, but some of them are still shining, I’m sure.

“Shush-shush,” whisper motherly wheels through slush on city streets:
It’s too early for plows to have been through at this wee hour. 

Tell me the names of the ones who rise long before the dawn:
They sing the darkened-sky-song, early-sweets among the sour. 

SURVIVORS

I saw seven turkeys cross the road
On a slow day at work,
So slow that there was time for me to drift,
Magnetic, 
To the front window,
Still frosted with last night’s snow,
To press my hands against cold single-pane,
Watch the flakes becoming rain,
As this flock that survived the holidays,
Just like me,
Walked tall, and confident of chest,
Making their way across the streets
That used to be their homeland,
Before we came, and thought we knew best.