Find and share the perfect poems.
But when the knife enters the trout,
there is not enough nothing in the blade
to spare the gills, not enough nothing
in the bright blood to keep the bucket water clear.
From The Last Map (Unsolicited Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Art Zilleruelo. Used with the permission of the author.
No family. Anything but that
distributed wave of same
blood, different bodies.
No friends. Let them find some other
pretext for hauling out the secret ledger,
for declaring one of their own
eliminated by the math.
Only our lawyer,
tramping through a field
with a napkin map,
a spade, and two parcels,
stopping in the shadow of an oak
to dig, to unfold and upend,
to pack the dirt down hard
over our last bed.
In a field near the lake
stands the ghost of a dead oak.
The ghost is black and very tall.
It never speaks or moves.
The sky wants to take it.
The earth wants to eat it.
But the ghost is strong, it does not want to move.
So it argues half its tongues into the dirt,
and grips hard against the sky’s glutton lung.
It whispers the other half into air,
and weathers the white earth’s thirst.
Like a frayed black suture it binds earth and sky together.
In this way the ghost stills its universe:
There is a hook that lives
in me, and any hand may tie
its line to the eye,
to reel me where it will,
to cast me out
in counterfeits of flight,
to tease a world of mouths
with intimations of a meal.
And I have learned through long repeat
the grammar of gravity,
the whiplash and the crash.
But in that span,
in the arc between the wrist’s snap
and the impact,
I am sovereign in a blue country
and am food for nothing.