Modern Water, Modern Blood (excerpt)

It’s snowing hard again,

and I don’t feel well about that

because now, it doesn’t just melt. Now,

city trucks carry it off by the ton

and dump it in the river,

and the river carries it off,

and this way

it won’t all melt at once and flood the city again.

(Disasters aren’t really worth

that “coming together” feeling we all get afterward.)

And since God hasn’t revised the water cycle in like

a million years,

we’re doing our part,

carrying away the snow in trucks,

which is the same snow as the year before,

recycled, the snow you’ve always watched

even though the blood you have is not the blood

you were born with

and the skin you have, at best,

is rotting.

Wouldn’t it be something if our cells

came away in chunks not so small

as to be invisible, but if we instead

shed whole layers like rattlesnakes,

and it was someone’s job to walk the streets

and clean it up.

The first time I saw the polluted orange

glow of a city from within that city,

I thought it was a phenomenon of nature,

a kind of Northern Lights.

I was walking on campus with my girlfriend and I looked up and noticed that the sky was fucking orange.

“The sky is fucking orange,” I told her, ecstatic.

“The whole sky is fucking orange. All the way across.”

I wonder how someone’s life might be different

if they believed every pollution

was actually a miracle.

The popcorn I made

to snack on during the blizzard

is cold now, and clings together in a sickly mass.

There is no good liquor left in the apartment.

Some cheap rum, but no whiskey.

Whiskey is best for blizzards.

Certain music is best for blizzards too.

As a rule of thumb, any band whose name ends in “head”

is probably good for blizzards:

Portishead, Radiohead, Zebrahead, Buckethead,

the Futureheads, Talking Heads, Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head

There are probably more,

which is sad. But at least I’m not the guy

on the street cleaning up people’s skin.