Urgent Care

Having to make eye contact

               with the economy—

A ball cap that says

               In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon

will turn blood red and then

               disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched

over an anatomy textbook, a student

               traces a heart

               over another heart—lunar eclipse.

In the bathroom, crayoned

               graffiti:

                              fuck the ♥

He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over,

               Mr. feverish Mange Denied:

like puzzling sabbath or

               street pupas; we shared

some recent typos: I’m

               mediated (his), my tiny bots

of stimulation, he

               loved the smudged

and swoony words that proved him

               human—

not a machine trying to infiltrate

               the servers

of the New York Times, from which he launched

               (gad shakes or hefty lama)

obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s

               black disaster, he

lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio)

               a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum,

                          some people

“from where I used to work,” so much info

               (we both agreed), “The umbra,”

the TV explained, shadow

               the earth was about to make—

      ...and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness...

      ...firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened...

      ...so benighted and hopelessly lost...

      ...their eyes to the errors...

MOON LORE, Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room,

               hour two.

Urgent Care. That was pretty

               multivalent. As in:

               We really need you to take care of this.

               We really need you

               to care for this.

               To care about this. We really need you

to peer through the clinic’s

               storefront window, on alert

               for the ballyhooed moon—

And there it was. Reddening

in its black sock, deep

               in the middle of the hour, of someone’s

               nutso-tinsel talk on splendor—

My fevered friend. Describing

the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads

               fitting like a flash drive

               into the port of a healer’s hands.