Sunday Poem

DAY FOR EVASION 

The morning offers evidence of a rain you slept through,
pavement like grease soaked through a sandwich bag,

and there’s definitely a fire burning inside the metal Muppet-mouthed
industrial garbage bin open outside No Frills. The fire’s low and mangy,

like a nest where light hatches, and the air out here
smells like a dentist’s office in its busy time: overheating rubber,

periodic elements, a fresh mess of fragile membrane
cut into, pulled back—every hard, impacted thing removed.

This is a pretty good day for evasion, and you’d like to
volunteer your service for something clean and memorable,

maybe running interference for the No Frills shoppers tenderly
nosing their way past displays shocking as capped front teeth,

performing what reads as a well-considered dumb show. This course
of action has all the vision, all the hoist of a boom lift. Now seems

as good a time as any to admit: you’ve never seen something so thoroughly
as to forget its name, and more than once, the constellations have let you down.

You can feel the day’s details waiting to pitch towards you like an airbag
deploying an ultra-white, full-frontal bloom of goodness in your face.

The fire in the bin is still brooding.
You’d like to tell someone its meaning isn’t lost on you.

From Failure to Thrive (ECW, 2014) by Suzannah Showler 

Failure to Thrive by Suzannah Showler © 2014 by ECW Press. Used with permission from the publisher.