REPEAT AND AGAIN REPEAT TOGETHER
Each moment of the day drops
straight from the sky as a sliver,
dropping in a vertical line,
lodging itself into our skin—
revealing the pure darkness that hid
behind the blue and cloudy mural above,
to leave thin, translucent spikes
sticking out from our arms, our legs.
And as the curtain above turns
to black with the absence of time,
we lie here, backs on grass,
dew climbing up and over our thighs.
If I remove your needles, will you
remove mine? Take your time—
we will pull each out, breathe on the spots
left behind, and put them in a satchel.
We will carry that bag every day—
and every day, gather a new one,
and every day, wind up in darkness again.
NEIGHBORLY GESTURES
Pollution in the hardware—
there’s no escaping,
the low hanging clouds spell
your name in wet cotton cursive
and fill themselves
with sludge, with oil, with a mass
of slurry just waiting to release
and here, we rush from storefront
to storefront trying to open a door
but no help arrives—in one, an old man
locks his palms to the handle
and sways back to block us out
and we are on the street open, naked,
unprepared for what is coming our way,
this pension of suffering
that is inevitable, but also so easily remedied
as that man disappears behind the blur
of his own breath, masking the glass.
Robert Krut is the author of This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), which received the Melissa Gregory Lanitis Poetry Prize, and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009). More information can be found at www.robert-krut.com.