I’m not even dressed before the pope
asks me for a lifelong yes.
A light warning with coffee: the poet
mistakes breaks for breaths.

I take this as a sign, an omen,
like a bus-stop kiosk engulfed in flames
on an empty street in Phoenix.
It’s midnight, and someone I once knew better

passes in a cab, headed for a red-eye
to Harrisburg, where I fly for funerals
for those lost to the million ways a coal mine
can kill you—perhaps this is a momentary calculation

of convenience, which the pope just cautioned against,
but I am seeing it all accordion-collapsed,
as from the window
of an ascending flight—

the tiny black cab, my friend’s body inside,
the difference between
what breaks
————and what breathes, smoke rising

off mountains in a poet’s exhale, and a fire
consumed with only one object for once
a structure of exploding glass
————a repetition of yes yes yes

what you once pulled from my body
on early mornings like these
the repurposing of what
was meant for shelter

from the rain, which I imagine rarely comes
to that vast and blazing city.

 

 

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Mary Kovaleski Byrnes is the author of So Long the Sky (Platypus). Her work can be found in Guernica, Meridian, Best of the Net, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and literature at Emerson College.

 

 

 

Photo by Kellie Shepherd Moeller on Unsplash