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