Farid says he wants to be a family,
he adds, by which I mean I don’t want you to die.
Arizona gnaws at the constitution.
I want to tell him that since
I was a child I have dreamed
of feeling like this, by which I mean safe.
Instead we talk about the baby.
She will cry a lot the first days
her skin in clothes, the air,
darkness and light, touch and taste
will shock her to tears.
I just read that somewhere.
Outside, temperatures filibuster spring.
The Dow “eyes” jobs, uses
a variety of special characters,
while we find a hole in the birdfeeder,
count box tops for a water bottle,
enter contests for a green home.
Suzuki compares existence to wrenching a droplet of water from a stream.
As water falls
separated by wind and rocks,
we are separated from oneness, then we have feeling.
Susan Briante is the author of Pioneers in the Study of Motion, Utopia Minus, and the chapbook The Market Is a Parasite That Looks Like a Nest, part of an ongoing lyric investigation of the stock market.
