My animals are out

We went to buy an angle grinder,
the wheel as light as a cat’s paw.
She wants to translate a chair.
Give it a brand new life. Later that night—

listening to the White Album in its entirety.
Mixing wine with water like
in the age of Cupid and Psyche.
Like responsible humans
not yet addicted to pain and its appetites.

Like insects.
Like everything else that tends
to abbreviate itself. A man commits suicide.
As troubling as that sounds it gets worse.

Everything is dry here.
Pink skin as high as the eye can see.
All the stories are about fires and wind.
Crows passing through car windows into safety.

When he left us he looked more like a crane
rising from common wood sedge lacquered
by the rays of the sun,
fingertips scorched awkwardly
into the skin of my arm.

Like the fire that chases animals
out of the forests
and then off the earth entirely.

 

 

Bryan D. Price’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Menacing Hedge, Portland Review (online), Posit, and R.KV.R.Y. He lives and teaches in the suburbs of southern California where he writes about time, memory, utopia, and its opposite.

© Bryan D. Price

Photo Credit: © srady / Adobe Stock