BY Adam Gianforcaro
Nature Walk
Ticks microwave their blood meal
and eat dinner alone while other beasts
run circles around heat-stroked starlings.
You know, God flooded the earth
for good reason. He, too, was sick
of the dusk-rotten summer. Earth
has hit the hottest temperatures on record
for I don’t know how many days now.
I guess we all hold ceremony
in our own desperate ways.
I read a poem to the dried-up riverbed
and visit all the places I used to keep cool
in your shadow. It’s the Year of the Rabbit,
year of admitting our collective calamities.
Look: my skin sweats with longing
and yet the bugs want nothing to do with me.
If they only knew how much I needed
their tradition of touch, to swell for weeks
in the aftermath of gnawing voracity.
Poem in Superposition
Quantum theory never paid us
any kind of favors.
It doesn’t matter
where or
how many spaces I occupy.
I say I could never be in
two places
at once
but isn’t that
what dreaming is?
Even water has more than one
liquid state.
I drop my glass and
break the time barrier,
rouse in a farm town down-
state.
Residents are up in arms
about the poultry plant.
They don’t care
about the slaughter, they care
about the smell.
It smells like shit
in this town they say.
In mere months
the place goes back
to normal. On fire, I mean.
And it’s amazing,
a miracle really:
to sleep so soundly
in the face
of mass death,
to wake again
in the same light
as yesterday's blackout.
Adam Gianforcaro is the author of the poetry collection Every Living Day (Thirty West Publishing House, 2023). His poems can be found in The Offing, Poet Lore, Third Coast, Northwest Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Delaware.