At the Heart of a Spiral

Michael stands before me,
says he knows my bible
better than he knows the earth
we try not to tread upon.

His smile carries a mass,
isolated and levitated.
His smile carries me back
to that second jetty

where the bricks were bludgeons,
the daffodils were lying,
and my tongue knew
the grass was green.

Nancy talks about her uncle
who grabbed everything in the medicine
cabinet and took his life
back to the doldrums.

Before the city, my pediatrician
blinded me, deafened me,
and showed me spring and all
the other seasons.

He taught me to push
a wheelbarrow, and that any land
can be art if you claim it.
If you make its case your own.

Under a Burnt Out Sun (a terminal of Sally Wen Mao’s Loquats)

There are insects in the canopy. They own the trees,
descend in droves, thrust forward their heads

to lacerate the vines and their fruits, spilling sweet
onto the bitter dirt, bullet holeing the loquats.

We watch them begin, your limbs splayed like broken twigs,
to consume us. Our lemonades have left us bereft,

two corpses drowning in condensation, a heart
and infinite hearts bearing famine like a mother,

bearing down on our lips, lemon barley tasted,
with a drone that sounds like a god that sounds like a cough.

Under the umbrella we used to swoon, foreheads bent to fungus,
eyes coveting the clavicle and its hollow.

My fingers were mud upon which we counted
the time between hours until the rain broke,

sloughing off my flesh in waves.
You collected the detritus, kept it in a jar for years

and brought it out on solstices to bow heads and Amen.
There was nothing better in those days than futility.

The wind would blow and leaves were little kisses.
I would see your face in the sign for the highway exit,

forehead vibrating over something expensive,
knowing we could find nothing more valuable than the caterpillars

tattooed to the bottom of the park bench, praying the wood rots.
We could laugh until there were crystals in our lungs,

and the house would shake with the disparate pitches.
The caterpillars laughed too, knowing us to be soon dead.

My feet lift off the pool deck. I am drunk on fossil fuels,
the oily film in my mouth overpowering the tang of the loquat.

In the burning days, the bugs would bite at us, snakelike,
while we watched the sun get bisected every night and only once.

Will Sheets is an undergrad student at the University of Richmond studying Creative Writing and English. He is originally from Upstate NY. His work has appeared in Flora Fiction, The Virginia Literary Review, and Fish Teeth Magazine. He also works as a reader for The Bicoastal Review.