Snails

There are many of them now. Is it easy to wait in the cellar? I can feel your answer it is difficult to breathe. When the doors are open again, no one will remember who we were. What are the words to shade our eyes? When we spoke, there were orchards and meadows, one fallen tree. Someone gave us a drink of water, a tiny seed, the assumption there is a music that we cannot hear. There are nights when the snails appear, moving slowly in darkness, disappearing in the tomato plants we grew before we couldn't see. How many windows did you close after the explosion, before the dead made decisions for you? I can't find the mind that knows what I am thinking, can't recall where I left my rosary with the worn beads, its broken chain spilling black dots to mark a journey for snails, this necklace for a silence crawling into the leaves.

The Flash

It hits your vision like the needles in the air that survived the explosion in the desert, the mushroom cloud exposing history as starvation marches across the horizon, great metals of radioactive composers plunging through the other side. Being photographed takes patience like the young man crawling out of the river barely alive, barbed wire on the border recording his illegal secrets as number 8,539 for the month. The flash and you are the camera, the moment it happened the second you moved and someone who wasn't there appeared behind you in the print. When it was examined, the white shape was your great-great-grandmother, dead forty-five years, waving one hand over your head, her gaping mouth the silent scream you were warned about when you were baptized as a child.

Stung By a Beetle

Stung by a huge flying beetle, I pinch it off my arm and throw the gray thing against the wall, its hard shell clicking on the bricks, breaking into marbles of hunger that roll onto the grass, twitching like buried smoke I stepped on when I gave in to lesser stars that fell without harm. I rub my arm as the red hole swells into a flute of skin, my lungs growing shorter as I sit on the grass, wait for the poison to hit my pounding heart, bring me the age of symmetrical beauty-burning dust I breathe to imagine the primary colors glowing on the bridge. Stung by a buzzing that crashed into my arm, I sit low to the ground, whisper to the red fox that crossed my path during my walk, its sudden appearance taking me to the remains of animals hidden in the dark, its bushy tail glimmering in the moonlight, its silent warning staying ahead of a fever I am going to love.