– I See a Sad Thing on a Hill –

1/
If the offspring of a storm’s
warning is the tension
between swell and burst
the sea seizes and shrinks
like a failing battery. It’s
time to announce that
something’s gone terribly
wrong. Too bad the sky
smirks and covers us with
its silence. If imperialists
will always push the borders
back into the bodies like brick
fences then I guess on goes the
waterspout of the century
moving all the plastics farther
out to the perimeter. Let’s rinse
our hands of the sly business
of measurements, push down
like life or death to anchor
our floating hearts.

2/
Some people I know suffer
their own clouds. They duplicate
themselves straight into the woods.
It looks like unidentified dangersputter
over a playground.
Is that what a drone is like?
I watch from a small hill
at a close distance. These are
not the urgent movements of a child
whose parent is always gone
on something like an island.
Because no machine can ever change
its mind we need each other
to be more and more alive. I think
I might have enough cracks to hold
a whole set of the world’s unsent
messages. Too bad I’m not sure who
is who or where is where inside my heart.
I mean it’s possible to fold up like paper
into a stranger’s purse but there’s gotta
be a better way to absorb these sprawling
campuses of no-good business, these
drought-induced bullets. Personless actions
are so much scarier than ill-intentioned persons.

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JESSE NISSIM is the author of Day cracks between the bones of the foot (Furniture Press Books, forthcoming in 2015), Where They Would Never Be Invited (Black Radish Books, forthcoming in 2016), as well as several chapbooks. Her poems have recently appeared in (or will soon appear in) DUSIE, Handsome, H_NGM_N, New American Writing, La Petite Zine, Really System, Shampoo, Spoon River Poetry Review and Sixth Finch.
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