by Joshua Horan
Compiling it together
Forget how to spell your own name
the world has already begun its revolutions,
those diamonds on ears keep us lifting
in cars parked alongside of the side of the road,
imperia as calluses on palms, those responses
to expansions of sculptures of rose gardens
held to quiet adolescence dreams repurposed
to those morningless moments of abstraction
off to the US of A, there has never been land
without, only landedness as a created category.
Those pestilences that were held in tow
now beget another in the form of yesterdays
abandoned like steel mills along rivers
flooded to make room for new condos for new people.
Roads abandoned by cars for deer to
retake as grasslands or watering holes or plains,
bed sheets on the floor next to books &
an empty pack of Marlboro Gold crumpled in the corner,
the socks dirtied & unwashed until
plants seeded begin to step out of the ground dirt.
those who’ll miss it are already gone
Two empty Modelo
boxes and a flat basketball,
the trees have all been ripped away the field that
was once alive now flattened with only two white
trailers standing in for life.
Across the street they have torn the corner building down,
which had protest signs for Antwon Rose.
“No trespassing” they tell me as I
walked by on public streets watching their fuckedness.
The earlier rain turns to falling snow and
I’m dreaming of a White Christmas,
but not like Ocean Vuong does in Vietnam as people escape,
dreaming about white Christmas in the way
that people are dying on the streets right here
tonight right now
in the way that Pittsburgh is always in the street
right now right here
but it’s never everybody
it’s always somebody not nobody
who they want to make nobody
but its somebody who’s always been there.
Here.
Or, maybe, it is the same Christmas Ocean
speaks about, stretching across this
sea of peoples hoping for something better
& unceasingly being left behind.
Frank G. Karioris (he/they/him/them) is a writer and educator based in Pittsburgh whose writing addresses issues of friendship, masculinity, and gender. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pittsburgh Poetry Journal, Collective Unrest, Maudlin House, Sooth Swarm Journal, and Crêpe & Penn amongst others. They are a regular contributor to Headline Poetry & Press.
Joshua Horan is a farmer and father living in rural Vermont. When not taking care of cows, his two wonderful boys Peter and Thomas, and his poet-wife Elisabeth Horan, he enjoys bird watching and taking nature photos. He is anti social media and impossible to find online.