As Things Got Worse
Colin Cheney

Your hands build a coral for the hungry ghosts
without all this monster, this green gravity.
I am the passcode to a network of locked flowers,
the birds threatening to take everything back—
Try again, you say, lifting the beer smoke to your lips,
the storm screaming at you from the shelves
how to scythe the dark twin blossoming,
keep me alive as elkhorn fern, almagest, tarantula.
What’s broken, the song or its bird?
Loss to make this field of flowers holy again,
to remind you what I once was, to let it speak
my apology. But I can’t say it true. I’m sorry—
as you carry this out toward the sea, this
attempt to banish this triggering cell.