It all seems new; the sky hasn’t been this color since Antietam.
And everything is calm.
Underneath the bridge, I’ve mistaken grocery bags for geese again.
I make a list of basic human graces and pet peeves hoping to encapsulate a definition, like air
for the body I want to fill.
There was once obsidian night, the evergreen bayonets
of a darkness once lost on me perhaps,
mistaken again.
Through the window you pointed to the unmoving moon—almost spherical,
having lost just a bit—our imperfect missing host
left on the dark open palm which remains
uneaten.
“She’s waning,” you say.
—A. J. Porras
This article appears in September 2016.
