Vanessa Aricco

I dream of a Tuscan sunset


I long for Tangier


Seven hours I speak to the future


Cellars full of wine barrels


Fruit


Earth


Alchemy


The balance that sways between us


Burnt charity


I see the bodies moving


Through desert around the mountains


Bodies from far away and bodies from home


We so long for absence of boundaries


Take the money give me forest


Move in the right direction


Pelagic beings (puh-la-jic)


Pushed north to Scandinavia


Northwestern Passages


Alaska, east to the Siberian Sea


Access to land


Mushrooms chickweed


Acronyms and layers


Leads to statis and


Derangement


Radical progress


In such miniscule


Adjustments


Warm montage


Twelve feet of


Tumbleweeds


Intervened


Things that cannot be uttered


In groans and mourning cries


We are not prepared for the worlds we speak of


When there’s nothing more


The mirage and the doll debate


A feral knowing takes over


What force makes us


Such ravaging pillars


God is the boogeyman


Humans, his goblins


Frankensteins in bed


Worshippers of free


Love and monsters


Once an innocent baby


Who taught us to terrorize


Between the rock and the river


Cooped up in a castle


Drowning in a gutter


When we forget to breathe


A week of rising tides


Finally silence all the machines are down


Tick-tock of the grandfather clock


A relic of a different time, it counts too fast


It chimes, too long on the inhale


A paused exhale


Is the world even out there anymore


Like the plastic-eating waxworms


The filtering soil


The fungus networks


And life-giving trees


Our bodies act as passages


Straining earth’s emotions


The universe expressing itself


I’ve fled a thousand times


Decorate for abandon


Truth is temporary


We are wavering


Olfactory


Old factory


Products of us all


Nature seems fine Without a bank account


Rivers empty even when


They pay the firing squad


Bang bang


I rattle on the floor


I want to be pollinated By the last bee


A full-faced moon


How hot can the sun get


Before we burn


An ounce of ocean


For every breech


Strapped a rock


To this body


To be dug up