The president’s face is not
BY ERIN RODONI
like mine. In small ways I’ve been hated,
loved, bruised by
burden. But the President’s
face is everywhere
and nowhere like the moon,
always and never someone’s
aphrodisiac, night
terror, escape
valve, excuse
to howl. We watch him
age in four years
a decade, a quarter century
in eight, and after
simply fade. When everyone’s asleep
I count dependents
on one hand, tweeze grays
with the other. Imagine his lips
on his daughter’s forehead
or cheek when he puts her to bed,
clean, fed, and for another day
safe. Maybe America’s like the one
who hasn’t come home yet,
two hours past curfew and still
no phone call, no text.
Every house tents its own
weather. In his it is always
November. Elsewhere the lightning
bugged lawns of June
under a half-mast
haiku moon. The cherry blossoms
either an almost divine kind
of shade or pulp beneath the millipede
feet of the crowd-
machine. He watches our lever-fists
insist on ignition. When you roll
back the petals of every decision,
what’s left? A bud, naked of
revision. Its inaugural
gasp. A lifetime. Then
its last.
A train fused to track and night flooding
BY ERIN RODONI
this Andean plateau, once inland
sea. Marooned salt ghosts white
at sunset, then sops up the colors like bread. Where did all that water go?
And how did it swamp the lungs of a boy
skipping
stones in a dry creek, a woman too
weak to climb her stairs? We sylph
the same darkness that spills
into valleys. Up here it is sheen
between stars. The moon-joint swivels
in its spent socket
and that feather-lashed cast still winks as if to lure
ships off the edges of maps.
**
Bright moments of sound burst
upward with smoke
from outdoor kitchens. I surface rough
alpaca blankets into the news from home,
eight days late
on a grainy TV screen.
Rooftop arms have already ceased
their desert-island reaching. My destination
is another city in standoff
with stars. I’ll buy a hot shower
in The Salt Hotel, stand in the steam
until I disappear.
