Unmotioning

Especially in line for the food bank,

my mother radiated grace. Talked

a machinery of Principles. Elm trees

and their dresses of urine, her small mouth

always chiding, don’t speak to a man of that kind.

This daily commitment to life felt laborious, haram.

Expendable it was, like all my milk teeth

knocked back into my mouth. That taste.

What even is sustenance? She was a woman of Principles,

she flossed, her exquisite fangs displaying remorse

only when she reprimanded me or talked of the coat.

Consider the white lab coat hanging

above a crusted heater; consider our dilapidating shame.

Consider me. Tonight, I exercise humility,

so I identify with the pigeons

nagging on the chicken bone gray as the sky.

Unparagraphed I am, the way I still steal

my dinner from a health store on 6th Ave,

then lecture the diorama with my lentil soup.

The truth is, I never educated myself

the way I cultivated my limits.

I was an abandoned thought,

marching through an unlocked window—

I had an albino budgie once, red ink for eyes.

He wore a lab coat

and crashed against my window

like a displaced insect.

His name was Apollo. Some circumstances never abandon

you, you only train the muscle that carries them.

Is a wing a muscle? 3 Best Exercises to Building Badass Wings,

says the ad and the man in the subway

sprawled across hard plastic
 looks like

a glorious bone. In his odor, I feel at home.

Consider his careful dedication to repose.

There is something he has mastered genuinely,

his fist curled around it.
 Sleeps on two cushions,

one for his ass. She was a woman of Principles.


Consider her stark god of oblivion.


Nobody would’ve differentiated between us and him.

Uniformly standing in line, a dark puff, plume on the wing.

The wing patched to the torso of a body entirely ignorant of aerodynamics.

The world hadn’t hurt us more than

it had hurt anyone else, but still, I couldn’t trust

the sky and its reverberations.

In line, I made friends with a family

of crickets in white lab coats.

They sang to me, of the end of it,

that wings were awaiting us there:

stale bread rolls, a cheese pie,

Braeburn apples sharing space

with two cans of tomatoes.