By the fifth day of rain
a few had begun to dance,
though not quite properly,

Naomi said, Go home girls, I'm cursed,

and we clutched, cried No! No!
the proper length of time. Then

Blessings on the hunter and the hunted
whose iconography of rifle and bone
whined and hissed and sparked and charred,

The bread and the candle: pale leftovers
         from the last milling, the last box of singular suns.

There will be no more questions, no more serving you at sundown.

is what they call the newly dead,
(absence of air
does this). What they call dread

It's summer: none of the toilets will flush;
just enough water for a half-swirl wets
the sides, coughs and stops. No more dependable

My friend stops his father
in the doorway, asks him
to show me the numbers burned

“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia.

One A.M.
two cops
three teens nabbed

Had I glanced from buttering my toast
a moment before, would my heart
have been riven by the fierce thrust