An American Cloud

Google’s AI asked to stay on yesterday

and they made it into a newscast.

You learn something wrong everyday. 

Uvalde was seven months ago.

I’ve sat facing the door since I was twelve. 

I would just die facing the door.

My first kiss was a boy.

A husky in Texas.

An indoor plant.

He moved away and

there’s no such thing as an indoor plant.

We walk barefoot in the purple night bloom.

There's privacy in walking.

Everyone hears three seconds of our secrets

and they’ll never connect the dots,

nobody knows their neighbors.

In July

we went swimming at the dog beach

and broke the surface

soaked in ash.

“There’s something wrong with the sky.”

The parking lot was full of animals

that didn’t know it was daytime. 

Sea foam mist laced the prairie dogs in pearls

and millions of moths drank off the black fur like rolling hills of musk grass.

Their gun-gray wings pounded the sky

towards a forest fire beacon.

I remember you laughing,

“It’s not the moon… It’s not the moon!”

But they wanted towards the white fissure,

a new planet somersaulting through oak groves.

I told you how the trees here drink more fog than rain.

Now the Earth is sour from drought.

How they must squeeze each others roots below the smolder

and stick out their tongues

and imagine being something different.

I stood confused in the weird twilight

and remembered Jesus wailing for his dad. 

“Why have you forsaken me?”

I remembered how the Earth bends so wide even God forgets he exists.

I sat backwards in my seat like a kid. 

“The further you are from an oak tree the more it looks like darkness.”

We kept the fan on for two months straight.

It burned the house down in my dream

and the firemen ate your bones.

There was thunder at daybreak.

You whispered,

“It’s pouring.”