Suburbs
There’s a Nature Play Center with real
sticks and oleander bushes out in back
of the craft brewery and all the t-shirts
are so cute and the train clicks around
the mall in cute circles while I stare
out the plastic window over my cute
child’s cute head. How I keep trucking:
drown in butter, drown in salt, drown
in sheets in the power outage. Smell
a hundred candles then dump a shot glass
of oil in wax and hold the string between index
and thumb like the future. Drive between two
Amazon big rigs, feel into my mystical power
like the tarot reader at the birthday bash
with the playful hors d’oeuvres. My child
shouts Choo choo at the tired conductor
in his faux-faded stripes. I stare out
the train window, see the place I go
to rifle other people’s clothes and
the place I go to be touched and painted,
chomp dopamine chips in a crinkly bag,
pray by staring at objects until they are shapes:
holy circle of water, sacred rectangle of light.
I do it often while my child peels out
the bones of his voice into sour-toilet air.
After dark, I please my body with sounds
from the robotic oval, pretend I am just
an organ in my child’s body, pink and wet
enough to flush what doesn’t feed, the dying
things everywhere that never seem to die.