From The Surface World
by Seth Copeland

It's just one of those omens you can’t see past—the blood red mark over everything, moving from the Great Plains to the Great Lakes, from the bowl where the dead air slumps to the lords of snow & beer. What assumptions will we make of each other. you & me in purge mode, leave the shelf take the bubbler – yesterday two guys in cuffs for smoking meth on a bench out front of the apartment complex. Up the street bare feet splash in puddles. Heat came late this summer — post solstice microwaves. Always too many goodbyes when there’s real distance coming. Every last dinner dances in whatever pulse is muffling. Remember the first days of June?—standing in the mizzly air of the courtyard every fudge ruin of dog shit somewhere surprises in the grass. Two young sisters gently handle a turtle while their mother watches.

Our heads just breaking the water.

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From the library’s third floor, the yellowing leaves on the maples look like the goldenrods along the sidewalk, all of it still blooming in a warmer September. No. You can’t think like that, but the flags are at half mast and once again you don’t yet know why. It’s too easy to give into the horror, even when the familiar tries to pull you back into itself, how when you come home, taking the stairwell, the vents fill you with the smells of others’ apartments, that same bed musk, overfilled sourtrash, dander, as you, or a version of you, and for a second, you are someone else looking at you on other steps.

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The shadow is trying to claim someone again. No. Listen for something better, something w/ ceramic skin, even after a thousand years in the tomb. Legacies on backorder. Small Lives Distributor shuts down. Tornadoes do their awful part back home for a second week.

Please.

There’s a name on this vase.

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