To Build an Owl by David Xiang

hear the blind widower, three houses down, stumble off his front porch and walk slowly onwards, into a cracking ocean of black asphalt?

All those quiet tragedies, topped off with Thanksgivings at the kid’s table; trapped down in the basement with your older cousins who took turns sneaking mulled wine and passed around polaroids of animals they gutted out of sheer boredom, because the Internet was down

Even now I won’t pick up the phone— Not on the first ring. And I blame the 90’s, the snake oil of technology; the grapefruit grunge of it all.

That hang up culture, all hung up to dry in the infinite fields which stretched between that past and this present. Dullness growing from distance, a programmable illusion of safety.

When I picture us as children, all I can see are the wine stems of our parents, folding like lawn chairs in the summer heat.

We were never children of God, so much as we were the quiet shuffle of report card day.

We Even Flowed like cheap printer ink, and were taught to mourn our loses in private, like one mourns the loss of their favorite porn star.

Not for nothing, but the future smells like knuckles cracking. The past sounds like the echo of snow hitting tree bark, wind chimes in May.

Turn on the news. There’s a war to be won.