Shed

It is true. Science has proven
what the old legends told us.
We carry lightning in our blood.
The glare and noise of town peel
from Isaac’s shoulders like bubbles
scraped from the body of a diver.
Neither here nor there but three
months into a one-year contract,
his feet shuffle a yawning silence.
Why play the stranger in a bar
where his home team’s long
shot staggered in the fifth.
Out past the game lands, where
leaves spill into the stubble fields,
the sky opens as a frost falls.
Stars graft brilliance from their void.
The mow and tilth starch his ankles.
Fire gathers patiently in his fingers.

Sense

Practically blind, busy ants
scour a racoon’s fractured
skull along the roadside
Claire walks each morning.
She slows, works to peer
around the blur in her glasses.
Gleaming through dew and black
rot, the socket and cheek tempt her
to gag and grieve for the creature,
knowing full well the grained bone,
seeming familiar, was never itself aware,
like the ants, swimming on senses
laced through unperceived impulse,
just so the bead of water, not
the cause of the spectrum it seems
forged to disperse through the
quivering silver ligature of its body,
just as she teeters there, unsure
of the tingling void that bears the
shape of her own leg and sole and step.