July

 

from my first collection, Meteorology

 

The Emperor's moon is an orange smudge. His sky, his heat wave. His dust

is eveywhere, on the leaves, over 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 sits.

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. Makes it change its composition, makes it pure again.

Run-off and spillage. Flouride, 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 gives us power to do with.

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,

so 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.

 

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First published in The Gettysburg Review

   

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images and text © by Alpay Ulku