fine, young cannibals
the cannibals are hungry
in the morning dew.
there is never enough weight
in the passenger seat.
a student raises his hand
with the wrong answer.
a blindfolded jury flies
into a raining courtroom.
the clouds are on trial.
a pianist reads music from receipts.
my wife and I survive
on the tendons of each other’s syntax:
lying
next to each other
her aunt can’t drive on the highway
without an apple
on the dashboard.
my uncle can’t hear a thing in English
but understands Portuguese
and reads the rustling of oaks for Zeus’s will.
she came home to find her Dad
with a shotgun at the top of the steps,
waiting for a telemarketer.
I came home to find my parents
younger than me.
pregnant with fear of weather.
lovers digest each other
birds build their nests
guards lock the cells for the night.
you can shake hands with anything after a while.
girls in the yard play hopscotch
soldiers clear a mine field
whales surface to breathe
the paint is chipping off the Taliban.
fundamentalist goats wander the Maghreb.
a frog dreams of tadpoles,
rainbows forget their keys,
midnight showed up on time for once.
the gates to the sugar castle are locked,
they’re now delivering mail on Sunday,
the penny is going out of style.
my mother calls jeans dungarees,
la gata es el gato,
communists are so cute now.
I won the green jacket for losing my page,
green and red are complimenting each other,
you can shake hands with anything,
after a while
it’s an acquired taste.
To Neptunians Just Now Hearing About Watergate
see us now in hives of savvy normalcy,
drones and Pantene with agile bombs.
dear listeners with chests made of blue distance,
forgive us our perpetual then.
Persephone is drying her hair in a river of sunshine
and there is an eagle in every dream,
doors unslammed.
if only we could drink
from your red eyed mountains
and camp in your blue tongued mountains.
unkill the fever and sweat
that made us change
into insomniac shoes
animals pacing our open cages
soul anorexics,
we walk the streets,
our mouths open,
to drink our reflections
from puddles.
Akiva Savett‘s poetry has been published in the chapbook Preservation and the literary journals Orange Room Review, Kerem, Poetica, Burningword, and Circa among others. He earned his M.A. in English from the University of Delaware and currently teaches English in Maryland. When he was 8, David Copperfield invited him on stage to help saw a woman in half; nonetheless, he is happily married today.
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