Cole Konopka

My bitter blue

Camp was a waste, and I exhausted myself
for no more than a popsicle cabin. I wanted
to live inside a house in a house. My hand

half-fit. I can’t remember how long I stayed
in the hot car after my family had gone inside. I
only remember him as on a strange road unfolding,

legs dangling numb through zig-zags. Some South
American fox stared him down in the heat until he
hallucinates me from the center console. I am

a mirror objection of the world. I’m bored/
I’m boring, but I saw, his fur was moon blue. He
across him in the back seat hadn’t nearly bloomed

in the dark. Zapped of all I little know, shoulder
holding him up to the moon, a gap spread
around all the car like a mall grown into desert

after millennia. Could I have driven further down
the driveway, into the garage and out the back of it
to have released us of everything I touched?

He would’ve had to have undone the seatbelt. The fox
wouldn’t say anything. I will not move. The center
in triplicate movement; more or less lithium, it drifts.

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I cannot deem an essence to the tree in the yard

I am drunk and in the yard before dusk. Up
the tree with greater effort than the last time
I climbed. Face to facelessness that nevertheless
reminds people of themselves in a standup mirror.

That you half die while growing I can understand
through loss; your reach toward the sun, your
thirst, are familiar. Even your resourceful
capital that could sell you to sacrifice
resembles meat fields of cubicles that lie before me.

We are separate kingdoms, and what tradition’s so attentive
to rooted patience through centuries? I touch
your bark and feel nothing what I know. You express
yourself in slighter gestures than I can tell apart
from the last stance. I look and look for your heart.