LUCAS PEEL

the minute it emerges, teeth bared, from the underbelly of a dumpster. how we must humanize

a thing before extending only our basic courtesies. i leave a trail of stale breadcrumbs or the

cooked carcass of another unhuman thing cubed and in no unusual pattern until it meets the

outstretched garden of skin i have cupped and knelt down before it. and already i am thinking of

the page and what will spill out from it as i tether this small speck of communion splayed out in

my memory. and i think i will speak of mycelium and the dank soil, fertile, its lineage of

roadkill, a language of both hunger and the large shadow we will eclipse into to fill ourselves

with anything but the empty we carry between us. and at once, the sputtered heart of a diesel

engine echoes through this forest of concrete, my friend or captive or wayward stranger startles

away into a place that is no longer before me. and still the aggregate is sticky in this prismed

light, and still i think of this poem and the dark patch of space it will one day inhabit, and still we

transcribe our guilt onto everything we deem worthy of a smiling face.