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.
