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Sara Talpos
350
The smoke detector, the car alarm, the ambulance siren all sounding at once. The day you decide to leave your job. The day you decide to stay. A scalpel, a resident’s hands fumbling, your son’s cries, screeching seagulls over the ocean. The Lord has stretched out his hand over the sea . . . small island nations preparing for the onslaught . . . Wail, you people of the island . . . below gas flares, sulfuric dioxide, methane, acid rain. And despair, my body a fallen tree. So let 350 be the bridge I become lifting my child when our kayak doesn’t meet the dock. Fighting to get back 350: hydroponic tomatoes, hoop-house lettuce, neighbors planting pawpaw trees. My man pushing a wheelbarrow, bending to gather storm-tossed sticks. 350 is more bike lanes, more skateboards. More darning of socks. My daughter about to be born: too late for a heparin lock, a heart monitor—only the power within me, the pain for which I’ve longed, and her release into our world gone beyond its limit. Contract. Push. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle, and upper decks. 350, let it be a boomerang, a ricochet. A beeswax candle on my birthday cake. 350, your husband, daughter . . . and you will enter . . . sister, lover, lifelong partner snugged against the fine ark of your ribs.
Mammoth
I lose my balance, gazing at your high skull, your sloped tusks, infinity of a theory, what man will do in a new world, boundless and crawling We were slight. We were furred and moon-eyed, and you continued Now there’s no limit to what these hands might do. over bogs and ice. At night, fears cluster, an entire constellation: packed with smog, carpenter ants tunneling the bedroom walls. hold my arms out to everything perilous and glowing. Eleven thousand years ago, another mammal crossed a river. Some days I bow down and touch the grass.
Body of Evidence Last night, we watched whole forests blaze, we watched a cliff face No spirit but ours hovering over the waters, sculpting the earth until it’s good. Who’s ready to be a god? Boiling water for spaghetti, I think not I. Dropping water bottles as Jonah, asleep in the innermost bowels of a ship. As a child, I tongued Sunday’s scrap of bread, testing the edges Wind ruined Job’s children, the house collapsing in on them. His own body festered, swathed in scabs and worms. a merciless frontier. Take my hand, I’m sinking. Job cries out for an answer, receives questions: Where were you given orders to the morning, or shown the dawn its place? I’m not asking to be saved.
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