I could use more quiet—the kind
that has me notice the feet-shuffling
sound the dry oak trees emit;
their kale-green
flapping audience.
So much worry fist bumping
other worries inside of me.
Are we ever settled enough
into a moment
to assess its full contours and dimensions?
How do I measure the exact loss I feel
when I call my mother, 1900 miles away,
and listen as she brings up,
repeatedly and at well-timed intervals,
the eight boats she sees racing
in the nearby harbor? Each boat
a freshly charged image glistening
with her particular joy,
yet no history of what she’s witnessed
three minutes before. What is history?
Hiccupping ghosts, narratives torn loose
from their moorings? The mind,
on the best of days,
an unpredictable and shifting abacus.
These days, I watch CNN videos
before breakfast—kaleidoscopes
blooming 60-second catastrophes
in my hand. I learn people are being
cut out of rubble five days after
a 7.8 magnitude earthquake.
A Yemeni mother gives birth ten hours
after being saved: the daughter’s name
in Arabic means silver. Then I switch
to TikTok. All over the world
people are rescuing sloths.
Those wide-eyed descendants
of the armadillo, who can starve
on a full stomach since it takes them
three days to digest a leaf.
Video after video shows a man
wrapping a sloth in his blue jacket.
He’s removing her from a rainy,
Central American highway. I pause,
with this man, to pick up the sloth.
He places her, matted with bugs—her baby
clinging to her fur—onto a tree by the road,
and before he leaves, she lifts one arm:
in a gesture of thanks,
or slow goodbye.
