We are all asking ourselves the question & by question mean we are all asking ourselves questions. Personally moral indignation gives way. Indignation gives way to a sort of sleep in the lower part of the spine & what of the seafloor & the way it washes up healing the feet with microbes. We don’t understand our cosmos. Staying home in reversal defending the immune system which is meant to defend you. All is backwards & the moment is rife with opportunity both to sip the sun like a nectar & also a place for the dark to creep right in & we have seen them do it over & over again. Darkness is a beautiful story an arch gripping the pericardium then opening ambrosial. This is how we want it to be but a sustainable victory is the flower on the sidewalk. Don’t edit the punctuation nor grammar nor spelling this is a new order. Expect subtle attacks to the stability of what you know to be good. Hang on to what it means to be human. Grip it like a lightbulb. By now you might be hypnotized by the ebb & flow. Cannot read the sentence which being an ocean has come to heal you. Put your toes in me in my mouth in the grain of my teeth & the way my tongue is the wind desert weary slowing down across the back of your hurt spot. For me it is mantras. Devotion to knowledge that one who sees is also the seen & heil to the essential worker. Mitigating sorrow in the midst of confusion. The period drops in a spray & the universe explodes. The universe is the land where you are standing. The universe is the smaller plot where you must stay. The spot is getting smaller dropping down are you hypnotized yet & then it is open. Go back to your lives. This never happened. My lamp within not the gaslight choking in the king’s mouth.
Copyright tanner menard. June 2020.
tanner menard is a non-binary poet & composer. Poems are their method of survival. tanner is a member of the Atakapa-Ishak Nation of Southwest Louisiana & Southeast Texas, resides in Flagstaff, AZ, is an organizer for Equality, AZ, an MFA student at Northern Arizona University, and a member of KPI’s Gender Diversity Initiative, currently on hiatus.