50. from earth day suite

“Your bad data caused

these gruesome rebirths! – “

thus the personal gravity

sinks through the woof,

altering time spaces

your footnote, residue,

a missing tile-sliver

from a floor mosaic,

so that someone awakens

with orange on her sole.

I am a woman trapped

in the body of the poem

it makes an epigram of

my epitaph without me.

*

Thousands of gulls stream

over the fly-overs so

they know it’s fall.

The gulls do not fall.

The fly-overs do not fly.

If I could make words into gulls

I would do so. It would not make

me God, but it would solve

many problems.

All my words would go

one way only, up.

The fly-overs are gulled.

The gulls fly over, and out –

from earth day suite, by Joseph Harrington. Chicago: Beard of Bees, 2010. Free download at: http://beardofbees.com/harrington.html

Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan University Press 2011), Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002), and the chapbook earth day suite (Beard of Bees 2010). His creative work also has appeared in Hotel Amerika, The Collagist, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and P-Queue, amongst others. He teaches at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.