Carpet Bomb
I can’t get rid of useful things
and nobody wants to pick them up,
I keep forgetting where I lay my umbrella.
I don’t leave footprints in the snow anymore,
we haven’t had a war on domestic soil in so long
I wonder if I still got it. Because once I had it.
I heard about a boy who once tied a string to his brother,
he tied his brother to the ocean and the ocean to the blackbird—
from the ground all the birds look like blackbirds
from the ground a Stealth Bomber looks like a spaceship.
The aliens are coming,
they walk through birthday parties
and basically go unnoticed.
And this is kind of how I go through life,
once I heated up a spoon in the microwave
the fish have so much mercury in them they spark.
I was handed a bayonet from the Civil War
and a copper penny corroded with rust.
When they take the Statue of Liberty apart to clean her
her neck explodes with a million little spiders.
Meanwhile in a forest somewhere
someone cut open my grandmother’s belly
and filled it with bricks
something is coming soon
I keep a bucket of lambs blood
by the front door.
Copyright Credit: Kenyatta Rogers, "Carpet Bomb." Copyright © 2018 Kenyatta Rogers. Used by permission of the author for PoetryNow, a partnership between the Poetry Foundation and the WFMT Radio Network.
Source: PoetryNow (2018)