BEN SEANOR

Today Is My Birthday

I want a field embraceable

as a golden-doodle.

I want to walk into a room and know

a bowl of cool

red pears wants to touch me.

To look down at my shadow

and see a marathon

of hellebore. Any little moment

can crown me

the good thing. A drawer

with only three old quarters,

a gang of pine needle

corpses, someone

never calling; absence

knocks and how could I not answer?

And if I cannot be the good thing,

let me at least be attendant

to what coaxes the light inside

onto someone’s outside:

I smell dogwood in the air

conditioning; I watch leaves shift,

repeated across a wall

of tv screens; I try to tell

the woman next to me

playing the video game demo

how to move herself

somewhere actual-

ly interesting, but she wants

to stay right here, pushing

the pixel boy

on his pixel swing.

When the boy was alive,

she says, he loved the real

ducks whose sounds

the speakers loop for us.

The Local Situation

We should talk about why

you laid down so easily

when the bullet

sleepwalked through your mass

like a corridor of night.

It is cold and it is morning,

but that isn’t it. No,

this is what it means to forget:

to make her chili, my friend

watches her husband skin you.

She makes sure

he treats you right,

so you can slip inside them

and keep them up at night,

kicking acid up at their throats.

At first you fell like the earth

body-checked you,

but that didn’t stop you

breathing. Did you forget

this is how a life ends?

I saw you coming

into the yard strapped

to the front of the truck.

Everyone in the house delighted

you opened yourself so completely

to the desires of our world.

You are a treasure.

Lost track of your step

and then your spine.

Only now, pulling the bag

of you from the freezer,

do I remember how it is

I can miss you, a bit

of velvet rubbed

onto the mind.

Disintegrating, I Move Toward the Heat

It’s this body.

I can at least tell you

that. The sky moves

behind the wind.

Rain and the night

make the window

almost

a mirror. Every

absence reveals

its meaning,

slowly and only

to you. Yellow

roses exhaling

wide above

a vase of its own

muckwater. Why

do you believe your body

can betray you?

Yes, I always

could be touched.

Ben Seanor is in America.