Geodes of the Western Hemisphere
By Jana Prikryl
The earth has feelings
some killed others in its mud and it has lots of mud
The earth builds a scrapyard, a sequence of them to tell
of this, a seam on its embalmed glabella future galaxies caress
The earth knows André Breton,
compiles ingenuous personalities in its fevered correspondence
Out of its winding sheet rolodex the earth erodes another name,
your name
Beware, the earth prepares to say one final time, construction
eclipses
It hoped to say nothing further and then was disappointed, its hope
misplaced it knew deep down
Say more,
you say, the earth had hoped you would
Express as little as possible with your furniture, find the little that is
as near to nothing as can be
The monuments unpictured drift up like watermarks through the odor
of the lens
You make things happen all the time, says the earth, take my advice
look the other way
Copyright Credit: Jana Prikryl, "Geodes of the Western Hemisphere" from The After Party. Copyright © 2016 by Jana Prikryl. Used by permission of Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The After Party (Tim Duggan Books, 2016)