Don't Get Up.

Don't Get Up.

Sean Cho Ayres

Outside that door

there’s an entire world that wants us

dead. Cacti store century old flash floods

in the soft of their arms: I believe

in drought and the unpuncturable silver

tongues of desert lizards. How much sad-

ness can I blame on history, I’ve been unburying

my father’s fathers for years now and the clouds

still won't get fat with rain for me. We could scatter

out belly fat in the sand for the vultures, cut off

their wings and pretend we aren’t dying. Leave

your shove. I’ll take off my shirt

and dab your gut wound. Lodge our house

key in the soft of your foot: when they find

our bodies they’ll come back to our room

and know we had nothing to leave. Close

your eyes and take me by the elbow. T

his world has left us

to become whatever we like.

Yes.

I’m terrified too.

Sean Cho Ayres is an MFA candidate at the University of California Irvine. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Portland Review, 30North Literary Review, The Mangrove, and elsewhere. He is a staff reader for Ploughshares. In the summer of 2019 he was a Mary K. Davis scholarship recipient for the Bear River Writing Conference. Ayres’s manuscript Not Bilingual was a finalist for the Write Bloody Publishing Poetry Prize.

Photo by Elias Domsch on Unsplash.