tonight the sun sets in its usual fashion

the spheres rotate inside themselves
and then circumnavigate bodies
in curved spacetime

my children splash diamonds
into the fire and acknowledge 
the red death

of the light as the arcs of aorta
and carotid spin erythrocytes
through their orbits

and the words which begin in
one mouth kiss another
bacterial and glittering

and the child who began as a 
cell swimming and joining 
now spins and joins

water to water blood to blood
stars scrape the inside of their
personal gravities

thermal kick and electric stance
i line up the photo so the ray
of sun splits the sound

and enters her as a lasered feather
she of almost 12 rotations 
her brother almost 4 

so many suns to open each eye
and so many deaths left 
to live through


when my knee decides to scream arthritically

i try to walk normally
force the leg to swing 
as if not through thick ink

and the pain makes the lunchtime walk
an exercise in either avoidant 
or immersive existentialism

i feel the surge ignore it
drift overhead and forget
i am a body for a few steps

it is a bit like functioning
after a death a divorce a trauma
and just moving my mouth

as if it is not disintegrated
as if my real person is not
200 feet underground 

normal choreography 
acceptable verbs for mild
soul dislocations

i have walked through the dark
the desert the light the valley
of many cuts 

under here the roots sing sweetly 
and the water gallops in the tunnels
just keep going through

i tell myself unbite my lip
relax pretend there is no pain
and hobble into each unrehearsed

room

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. He attributes his writing skill to listening to rain fall upwards from the bottom of a fictional aquarium. His most recent book, each imaginary arrow, is now available from Impspired Press. Upcoming in early 2024, his collaboration with the California poet Daniel McGinn called Fill Me With Birds will be published by Meat For Tea Press, as well as his book of prose poems Sapphires on the Graves from Glass Lyre Press. More of his work can be found at ferrypoetry.com.

Image: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.