Plastic Heaven Lasts Forever
13 eons ago i grieved shyly—
as i couldn’t make mincemeat
out of the night we met,
i had a hard time with the teeth,
entirely non-compostable.
no lies, really decomposing.
shuffle,
*this is our empty box
[perhaps outrage is a conditioned
response to move what we cannot touch]
mid-afternoon & i think
those thoughts inconsolable:
“O, to unscramble your face
like those sliding tile puzzles
you find gambling in cereal
boxes until they are no longer plastic.”
reshuffle:
*this is our newborn box
[we realized electrons can only push
so we scrabbled my knees
with your daisy chaining fingers
in an attempt to touch]
like the gum in your anagrammatic intestines,
has it really been 7 years since we were
unchanging? a linear perception of time is like
rounding my height down to 5’11.
plastic heaven lasts forever
& my bones are tethered for as long as forever is.
unshuffled.
*this is our terminal box [like the little letters you passed me while we waited for time to reboot the right-side of their mind.]
[they make me feel like you’re really here.]
MMJames (Maggie Matthew James) is a concrete poet and essayist from Sussex and the Bay Area. Their work has appeared in *82 Review and Jeopardy Magazine. They moonlight as a roly-poly who lives in our brains, @pingotooby on Instagram.
BACK TO ISSUE