Love in the Injustice Age

First featured in the Gyroscope Review

Love In The Injustice Age (published in the Fall Issue of Shantih Journal [Oct. 6, 2018])

is when you know someone so well

you could be her scream.

Tia and I, we have caught a glimpse

of our extinction; we are hunting it down.

We build peace with justice, Tia and I.

She cracks jokes like belts and I dig like an insult

and the scant trees seize in the wind.

We make this ditch with pick axes

and fear and sick hope and just us.

We are trying to prevent wasteland –

place where no mystery can live – at least somewhere

and so we have to dig. Past dirt, through

the fat bones of old trees, below

water tables, screaming with life.

Barrier. But we must find what everyone

will believe is worth saving.

Tia shares personal opinions about love

and cancer. I press her to keep digging with me.

We must find something gold for humanity

and we must find it here. We do stop –

for snacks, for sleep, to watch darkened light

plunder the growing thunderheads.

Birds fly in off the tsunamic sea that is hooked

like a rubber band around God’s thumb.

‘Do you hear that sound?’ Tia asks, leaning

her shovel into juicy soil. Nothing from the birds

but the moon, small but good shepherd, yelps

against our never-dulled blades. Frogs, the ones

we haven’t dissected in our hurry, waddlecrawl

across sticky leaves we’ve tossed aside.

Blades buzz in the sepia breeze. Tia gets to the ground,

wrists, elbows, triceps, ear. “Here.” She handprints

the pulped dirt. “Here.” I see the scream –

blue holes in my vision – before I feel it gash my throat.

Tia buries her face in the slit shoulder of earth.

It is painful to believe that every rock is sacred because

nothing survives love.

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