July
The Emperor's moon is an orange smudge. His sky, his heatwave. His dust
is everywhere, on the leaves, on the arc lamps. On the doorsteps people sit on drinking beer.
They watch a jogger who doesn’t belong there. The light turns green, and a car just sits and idles.
Someone’s looking to get shot, they mutter. A car horn blasts. His dams make the river run
backward, make it rise and make it fall. He makes it change its composition, makes it pure again.
Run off and spillage. Fluoride, bleach. Islands of coal pushed by tugboats.
He makes glass and iron, and he takes our cancers away.
He digs lakes and lays fields to sustain us. The sweat down our backs dries deliciously
in the cool rooms where file servers keep accounts. He provides us with power.
Days that turn like a miller's wheel, nights the air in our lungs. His ashes
are everywhere, in the chambers where gasoline is trapped, compressed, and then ignited –
that's the force that drives the rods that make the engines work, in the tips of our cigarettes
flicked in the gutters. A car horn blasts. A window goes down. Someone yells something
about sleep. Shut up, someone replies. You go to hell. Why don't you come here and make me.
from my book Meteorology (BOA Editions)
First published in The Gettysburg Review
All text and images on this site © by Alpay Ulku