Windex mice squeak through the windows,
biting newspaper as it scrapes across.

Soap from a new age fills the kitchen,

sheeps' fat long forgotten,
the sod-house of Laura Ingalls Wilder left behind
with its crumbling Lincoln logs,
the ceiling that drops dirt crumbs like a gritty pastry.

Our world is shiny,
so blinding that even the cough of newsprint makes it brighter.

A bottle sneezes across the counter, spurts those
bubbles of ammonia, gathers with the
rivers and tides that surge with ethanol,

it bursts the air with a neon smell and erases
everything that has come before.

It's either the airline food or the thought of you that's making my heart win the marathon.
All I'm waiting for is the plane to melt through the clouds and wash the snow away,
because sometimes ten days is longer than that.

I want to swim through the sky.
Right now it's a gulp of something cold and dark,
sculpting mountains in the distance
with clouds at the bottom like dropped clothes and plump toes.

Angels, do you look where the snowflakes fall?
Or do you just rub your elbows along the highest points,
brush your hair with the jagged pieces and let it loose?
I would dance in jubilation, invent words and reinvent unicorns,
drop a new language like a bomb and blow everybody kisses
if I were an angel,

I would tell people that words, paint and piano are the same thing in different bodies.
I would pet the muttering dogs,
show people trash on the streets and say, look, how beautiful,
and then I would fly off into the perfect water sky.

The bread blushes into a golden brown,
lettuce whispering to itself in the bowl
and Frisbees of cucumber at the bottom.
Later, men will grumble satisfactory masculinities
(bertha bertha you’ve done it again)
while dishes in women’s hands
laugh their way to the sink and
the yellow light inside keeps out the pitch black
universe beyond the light splashed windows.

Sunflowers bow their heads under a reversed tundra of sky. Their waterlogged faces are edged with dirt, old-age etchings fill in eyes and foreheads. Fever-weight lowers behemoth blooms of yellow into a brown-red shame, they're perched on stalks like the homeless on pedestals. They yearn for the gutter. Broad faces ease towards eachother,

feel grain on your cheek,
crumble, fall and
sink into sleep.

Like clustered balloons,
gentle armada pads
through the grey city.