A Crown of Dust

(a cento)



9

We're skilled at living in the ruins of our cities.

There is shame in it, the craving
for prestige.

Later is more difficult to picture,
And now that the sun is going
the body's betrayals piling up faster each year, 

some bills marked Urgent!
some Immediate Attention!

                                         The mice ransack
our rations, score them with teeth-marks. In the kitchen, fire

the fossil of your stopping in the wax of the candle

Yet the wars continue. In the West Bank
a child blown to bits, playing by the sea.

Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.



Line sources:
Carmen Calatayud, Diane Seuss, Jehanne Dubrow, Olatunde
Osinaike, Nancy Naomi Carlson, Eamonn Lynskey, Julia
Bouwsma, John W. Sexton, Rafael Campo, Nicholas Wong