Where the Fuck Is the North Star?
by Libby Croce
In the straw lot across from the dried-up municipal waterpark,
four graham-cracker-colored pitbulls nibble on each other’s ears.
Congratulations, I say to their mother, that one has your nose. You must be proud.
When did I stop noticing things? I kick a little gravel and my heart hurls
its coffee table across my chest. Listen up, pal. You’re not going to get
your security deposit back if you keep acting this way. You’re trashing
the place. There are other ways to love the world. Overhead, the moon
dissolves with indifference—the world’s largest breath mint, a baseball
in a tar pit. I spit and run my tongue around my mouth to keep it
from rusting over. Two feet from the train at midnight, I wait for
something—what, exactly? Suddenly, I’m leaf litter. Little wordless canals
go on pumping all this hot juice around my body. In my bed sheets,
I’m a small rodent or the indent of what was, imprint of an owl in snow.
I try to bring the shovel down on a robin whose spine is all but jutting
out of its neck, but I can’t. When it turns to look at me, its eye the smallest
magnetic compass, I can’t tell if it’s asking please or don’t or are you a field?