You ask me to talk
about the interior
it was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple-branches & thyme
was a new anatomy a beaten hide
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids
& the bee born out & the grist of them born
glistening as coins
it was anthem
was the listening
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was hurdle & burn burning through
the infinite your overbright comet
was made of stones made of berries & plastic & boxtops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark there was darkness there
like the afterhours inside a library
From You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior. Copyright © 2016 by Carolina Ebeid. Used with the permission of the author.