My mother’s been dead for three months.
I don’t know where she is now or how she got there.
I’ve heard all kinds of conjecture, and some
I believe. But firsthand experience comes last.

I understand—the NO ONE CARES billboard
looms over the exit ramp; Nancy has lost her place
in her novel for the umpteenth time; the Lab
has dysplasia.

Why should I want to return
to a time where even when I occupied that time
I wanted to go back to another time

Up till three reading zombie
comic books, I wake to video- 
game first-person shooters

My grandmother had eight children,
one of them twice.

The first Olga lived
a mere month,

succeeded by my mother,
the second Olga,

In Regent’s Park the cleanup’s incomplete.
Though weeks have passed, it seems it’s still occurring.
You drive. We talk. Ambition is a theme.

I predict, like the one who was sucked to sea 
and returned in an Arabian container ship, 
all small worlds will be dashed and drowned. 

We trapped him—
the dignified male
with the graceful neck—

The cracked creekbed sang with heat that afternoon.
My eyes scoured the brush for shed snakeskin
When far off the dazed whistle of a train

        After the snow, after carved corpses
exposed the icy survival of the last 
     Donner Party members, the Belgian