Originally published in Dialogist. Poetry, Week 2. 2024.
Down the casino hallway a sweet chlorine smell
The pool for public strangers A boyfriend
lifts his girl up over his head
If the earth is one big living organism holding us
giving us jobs Like us Like us and the bacteria in us
Then
If/then humans making plastic is a symptom
of a sickness
Ohh ever write a poem and it thinks too much
when it should be wailing That’s this one
So do you think it’s possible to fix this The wafting
of sugary chemicals about the slot machines
the waste this aching the thinking and thinking
I left part of myself in an old virtual world
that stopped being built like a decade ago
I had a digital body with sharp strawberry hair
I place my body plainly through space
I left South Dakota
Holding a coke can on a waterfall path on a black lake
with big boulders coming to the sky like big bellies
of floating stone monsters
I don’t claim to know too much about the planet
Just bits and pieces of it that break off and slide into
its own waters
We can float too
We can float to the concrete edges
on our backs in the humid casino pool room
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