How You Wait

The wheel of probable harm

falls forward over the inaction

of a state, over the houses

as fangs along a cancerous jaw.

 

The rate of loss is not hesitant,

finger-tapping uncertainty

finalizing the weight of itself

in a legislative session.

 

The meaning of heavy metals

diffused into water affixes to

a father’s fading eye, the pull

of a tumor on the optic nerve.

 

When you are dealing with

polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons

there is no security. There is no

contact negotiation delay of metastasis.

 

A lung is water, is the immediacy

of intake, ingest, infiltrate.

From under the cover of process

what venom stretches itself

 

through a body. What is

shouldered anonymous in the

authoritative solitude of night

but this injured vessel.

Photo of Ryan Clark, a bearded white man with glasses standing in front of bookshelves.

Author: Ryan Clark

Ryan Clark is a documentary poet who writes his poems using a unique method of homophonic translation. He is the author of Arizona SB 1070: An Act (Downstate Legacies) and How I Pitched the First Curve (Lit Fest Press), as well as the chapbook Suppose / a Presence (Action, Spectacle). A former military brat, he lives in North Carolina with his partner and cats.

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