May 16, 2012
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Sometimes I believe the landscaping
truck full of tree limbs
with the bumper sticker that says “Trees don’t bleed.”
because I believe in a certain limblessness—
I believe in the simple painless beauty of that
move toward cordless,
and then cell.
My iPhone is a small room.
It arrived without umbilical cord. Branchless,
doorless. I want this isolation.
I just want a trunk
the size of my grandfather’s cigarette tin
to put everything in, but without the hassle
of lineage. The Airedale wags its cropped tail
anyway, I’ve noticed. I’ve remarked
how they’ve made the garden, neatly
they’ve made it into a perfect line
of small pruned box-bushes.
Walking by them, I see the cuts:
little yellow-sap topazes
like my birthstone earrings.
This poem was one of the winners of the 2012 “Discovery” Poetry Contest.
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May 16, 2012
