atlas goes under
hanna’s outer band bears down on the man.
waves impound concrete piles on north padre island. a mist-maker, circling in his pen,
hurls the sun to work for grams. atlas maps palms pouncing our borderlands.
he salvages what mangroves supply to their roots’ belonging, throws tailings at the dam:
the monarch of mustang island, whose tower buckles on loblollies, captures
his dune grass with air conditioning.
it’s the warmest summer since the thankless tolling of a pendulum.
the earth keeps spinning towards lunch for ectopic life.
the feeder fish flees to a bowl of rice inside each of us, who’s a pail against the well in the
metamorphosis of storm to a machine’s hollowing badum-drum.
hanna crosses the fence to the pheasant sanctuary.
water leaves them flightless with lilliputians: whims of poseidon that’d flood the tank.
alas, atlas has strength, but he cannot swim.
for west virginia, heart grows fonder
after a national river floods
old boy we look wet to allegheny what to
do but golden gallows don’t
drain black tubes, it is bellow too tough. winds brush
outcrop i make chicken on, too
afraid them suneyes will shut. poplars rise at diamond
bluff to screwtail deviling a rope,
some metals. no muscle gorge making cuts in a fountain
drenched shawnee blood. backwoods backing
rhododendrons, princess of our mountains. so the soil is poisoned:
hear statesmen crispen & lips saying
brailled lizard-skin to best be chanting the hare, should us shepherds smell,
then move a village inside nuttal sand-
stone dug road, so creaky shaley springs forth a yellow, with me, the yoke
& mother, a load of standing roofers crossing
endless milder walls, younger for moonshine, the tendered lookers on.
flight is grist, ground bakes ice malt,
spin spun clothes coming off the summit: 70,000 acres
a way we cross & dropping stark,
in august, the river’s family sweeping around small bluffs, grows up.
i let me wrong us. the aspirant you are runs to the fox
on the windy seat of county, to hear from my heart:
this body hunts outside your coastal time.
it carves bitumen art. we still have the smudge.
Zixiang Zhang (he/him/his) has poems published or forthcoming in Hanging Loose, Cathexis Northwest, Consilience, Pedestal, The Nature of Our Times, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality, and others. He holds a degree in geology from Stanford University. Once, he published a study on brachiopods in the journal Paleobiology. Now, he teaches Earth science at a small high school in NYC and enjoys growing succulents, erging,sunbathing, and sundry. He may be active @zzverse.
Image: Dosseman, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
