Today's poem is by Elton Glaser

Mortropolis
       

What city do I live in? I live in
Atrocity, among
The strangled, the backbroke, the disemboweled.

Sometimes there's war, and sometimes not.
You can tell
By looking at the streets: filled with

Rubble and dogs on fire; or filled
With bikes and cars
And shoppers on the sidewalk, one of whom

May be carrying, tucked up his sleeve,
A gutting knife,
Or a rogue cell breeding in his pancreas.

We die by millions; we die one by one.
And some, the unexpected
And the unexplained, go into cold storage,

Where the death doctors will study them
With tubes and calibrations,
Bone whining away under a noisy saw

That opens the dome to its inner chamber,
Or splits the little well
Where a hand scoops out the clenched heart.

And so it happens everywhere, in Havana
Of the rum-mellow afternoons,
And in Berlin on the stony mornings,

Wherever we live in the shadow of ourselves,
In murder or disease,
By tumor or crime or statistical attrition.

And what shall I do until then,
In this reliquary flesh?
I savor the makeshift days, freewheeling

Through the loopholes, feasting on
The meaty olives
And crusty bread, on the red uplifted wine.

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Copyright © 2024 Elton Glaser All rights reserved
from Bennington Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission