North American Kittens
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Don’t tell me I don’t know
this place. These remarkable hills and more remarkable shopping carts. This afternoon distending directly into the upstairs closet where you sleep on duffel bags with pills in every pocket of your denim jacket. I offer you a cucumber. You sacrifice our friendship for a stricter politics of sabotage. Indifference is a privilege. But it’s difficult to commit to loving every living thing when you don’t know when death begins. When I say America, you see airbrushed beaches and sealed packages of syringes. I see a vacant lot swarming with bodies on BMX bikes. I see every liquor store in Norwalk shining beneath dilated stars. An anarchist dentist from Soviet Georgia once told me North Americans are kittens. Nothing I write will get me killed. The universe continues as an endless series of births. At some point, when our molecules recycle, we will become each other. We will stop rehearsing ourselves to bathroom mirrors. My hands will be a sofa or a beam of future light. Your eyes will be a monk’s tennis racket or an automatic rifle. Until then, I will go on jogging with my dad. |
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Social Hour
Inside the bedroom
there are spiders.
God is always on
the phone with them,
you said after I told
you that I want to be
left alone for at least
a year. When I walk
our daughter to school
I want to tell her things
that will help her sleep.
At night the walls tell you,
No one is brave,
but they don’t talk to me.
I watch the spiders
and listen to the stream
where the deer mingle
without social anxiety.
there are spiders.
God is always on
the phone with them,
you said after I told
you that I want to be
left alone for at least
a year. When I walk
our daughter to school
I want to tell her things
that will help her sleep.
At night the walls tell you,
No one is brave,
but they don’t talk to me.
I watch the spiders
and listen to the stream
where the deer mingle
without social anxiety.
Vincent Poturica’s writing appears or is forthcoming in New England Review, DIAGRAM, Western Humanities Review, and Forklift, Ohio. He lives with his wife and daughter in Long Beach, CA, where he teaches at local community colleges.
Originally a poet, Rebecca Norris Webb often interweaves her text and photographs in her books, most notably with her monograph, My Dakota — an elegy for her brother who died unexpectedly — with a solo exhibition of the work at The Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015, and a second edition published this winter. Her photographs have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Le Monde, among other publications. Her sixth book, Slant Rhymes, with her husband and creative partner Alex Webb, will be released next spring. The work was inspired by their joint Instagram.