American Quartet
       

I.

Warren wants us to be anarchists with him in preparation for apocalyptic shortages of quinces
        and herbal medicines I I want to be a rapper

with a cameo in G. O'Keeffe's Black Pansy & Forget-Me-Nots. Just let me be a ladder with

        the nine green steps.

Just let me be the one attached to flowers and their messages I it's raining and Hey the desert

plants and buttes I saw were the color of make-up, low-
        high color and peach fire, concrete and hollow green

and silver and orange, that's the west. I want to move

in groups and be communal, antinomian
and block-printing our own napkins like

        at Bloomsbury but also

I'd really like to speak about the wretchedness of justifying art class by saying it'll make kids
        better at computer stuff.

II.

On this

Warren and I agree: we don't want to dig

        a well without a blues

for digging wells. I really can't dig a well
at all and Warren can but having this first
thing in common

even though he once said art comes
second to survival he gave me this

beautiful red garlic which he could not have made
without art so

we consider each other companions of the flame.

III.

In the shiny woods with my lover by all the crazy
little waterfalls and he started to talk

about Hannah Arendt again. I thought the daylight
moon is thin as a forget-me-not and

scratchy on its other side is like pansy black. It's weird
in the mournful eastern mountains where

we live Kevin said appearances are important like
the "fact" that this spot of good-smelling blue

shade used to be an ocean floor
isn't true. I said maybe geological time is like

a poem, it can just help you understand
why it feels so interesting here and down

in the town I love the new pine siding
on the hut in the community

park which is a very humble park given for an air
force pilot by his parents. They have these "home-

town heroes" flags everywhere now in towns
with pictures of local people who died in war we

walk underneath & there's no song. I'm white

so I think iill I wanted was to be Considered
Suicide/When the Rainbow was a Bluff.

IV.

        ~ Dream: Everyone
in the old school building
in sleeping sacks eating

ham pot pie and telling stories
forever but some people would talk too much and I'd want

        to be alone.

        ~ Real Thing: After I put two hundred
and fifty thousand miles on it and got
backed into twice and tore

the mirror off on the side of the barn my dead
dad's car finally wouldn't start. It

turned out it only needed a new battery so I cried and
wrote a kind oflove note to my mechanic

Harry who makes me think about how all
the people who are different from

you are also different

        from each other.

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Copyright © 2017 Abby Minor All rights reserved
from CutBank
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission