the map emphatic with line grayed out Areas
declaratives of spellings conqueror

streets shrinking seas tell me what difference whose
name we pronounce over the pothole

Fiat’s coarse tires crack into earth begotten
of sergeants swallowtails topsoil

profiling how much run off
owl rain estrogen

below other horizons other names
for skulls let’s agree

the map self-portraiture parse
its starvations

cannot point us south

 

***

 

Priscilla Wathington is a consulting editor to the children’s rights group, Defense for Children International – Palestine. Her poems have previously appeared in Rosebud Magazine, The Baltimore Review, Spark and Echo Arts, Sukoon, Mizna and The Normal School.

 

Well done, Universe. Comes to millions and millions and millions of millennia, stereoscopic vision, bipedalism, opposable thumbs, consciousness, and finally, a thing you cannot eat. Immortality!

xxxxxxxxxxPlastic.

xxxxxxxxxxToday, the inedibles gather upon the waters. Much of my own diet too is synthetic and indigestible.

xxxxxxxxxxOnly now do we understand what our planet ever wanted: to be utterly pliant, and never to die.

 

***

 

Geoff Bouvier’s first book, Living Room, won the APR/Honickman Prize, and was published in 2005 by Copper Canyon. His second book, Glass Harmonica, appeared in 2011 from Quale Press. In 2009, he was the Roberta C. Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at the University of California-Berkeley. He earned an MFA from Bard College in 1997 and a PhD in poetry from Florida State in 2016.