the blinding of evolution by helen

Smouldering rounds of beef were setting down the sun

beneath the foggy briquettes.

We packed them in bread bowls with cold onions,

crisp ash cut in thick rings

that should have taken many years to grow

but were as young as the flies that fed on them.

Don’t cry for me, Argentina, Glee Club lamented

in the living room on a television my sister ignored,

thumbing her phone through skin and bone.

You and your lover and I ate without her

at the table behind the couch, thinking

of all the Argentinas Kurt could mean.

Names of women and names of countries,

my grandmother and where she was born

but never lived, Argentina, the Swedish woman

who worked at a post-it note factory before fleeing

the Nazis, who made me cry as a baby when she stared

with her spider’s eight eyes, who spoke as many

languages but had no teeth to pronounce them with.

The last time she visited was Christmas eve of 2009

when she gave me a crystal blue necklace

and stole half the presents from under the tree.

Argentina, who they say once melted my mother’s debit

card down to goo in a pan and drank it.

Said she was putting the sunset in her throat.

Said I could have some if she kissed me.

I keep stumbling on the love

that falls out of strangers bags on the way home

from the grocery store and discovering

many soft places where rot wormed,

long gold fingers of mold blossoming

unseen in the pith just under the skin

like a sound trying to get out of a speeding ticket.

It bored me. You shiny chassis, you sunlight shattered

over the spike of a yellow cone marking

a construction zone. Instead of the answer

to everything impossible you asked for a king

and they told you to go fishing.

But good god I wanted it. Not love.

The king you caught. It wiggled in your fingers

like a playing card. God and I,

we did not speak. Our company

even more than our country, America

or one of them, was gluttonous

and burned wastefully. God!

The smoke made it hard to see.

White rabbit, White rabbit

we chanted to make it leave.

We didn’t believe in magic.

Still we wanted to prove ourselves wrong.

We put our backs on the shed and tried not

to touch knees. Ambiguity an ultimatum.

It was us or the shovels. A hole always gives.

Scattered on the pine needled concrete

amongst our dirty limbs

lay lighters, torches, vapes, a box

of matches. Lightning bugs sparked

on the grassblades like circus freaks.

It burned the ground and in our blood.

Some embers stopped catching the light,

and some kept throwing it back anyway.

We put our bodies on the edge

of the invisible gravel road, picking bare feet

around patches of thistle.

It was actually softer than the sharp rock,

more crushable, but we feared

the more alive thing, the moonlight tricking

its petals into knives.

Eventually we gave up on being good.

I got cold and tried to put my dress on

but you kept putting it back open.

Said you had the sunset in your stomachs,

said I could have it if you kissed me.