Trip Wire

Hallucinations starting now.
Digital birdsong across rooftops, like radios through combat
a dog whistle heat
that downpours bullet shells against window panes.

I walk through the construction
to a garden, where the theme is freedom
or forgiveness.

They say point to where it hurts
and my finger lands on a quiet midday,
when light is a glowing defeat stretching down streets, not in fullness,
but in scattered straight lines,
making buildings like Xs on axis

A plot against me.

I drum the metal aftermath
of reckoning each step with the sidewalk.

Take inventory of the passerby,
internalize the shift of an observer,
ask if they will play fair.

And through steel screens and slack jaw,
cut grass and infantry steps.

It’s clearer now, that everything belongs
to these opened hands that can’t clutch.

____
Phoebe Blackman lives in Los Angeles.