She died with her aspirations inside her
but then, so do we all
after we’ve let out as many as we can.

I tore my wings, but it turned out that
I didn’t need them because I am a fish,
and wings are cliché, anyway,
say the people who don’t have them.

Because to show you how I feel
or what I see and how I get along in life
and who lives in my head (after I make them),
all the places where I am double-jointed
just like you and different from you,
where I creak and where I don’t.
All the water I ever drank is in my fingers,
and if I show you, you can swim.

Trust me to double your mice in as little as two days.
Trust me to enable your sheep to fly on doubled wings.
No sides of beef are equal to the equal of clone beef.
The right partner in this venture means everything.
The wrong partner will leave you by a mountain or lake
with half a fish, a hungry crowd, no miracles to speak of.

Look at the trees, how they tell us to
do other things with our life.
I once made a jug
without any handles. I smoothed it
with slip that was the color of
a cat’s ear,
but then it fell apart in the kiln.
I am not a tree. I never made a jug.
I did make a clay Popsicle once,
and that’s what fell apart.

I wanted to say something insensible
about a dead end, how it looks
like a maypole but can’t be danced
around. So many things can’t be
avoided now, as the earth warms
or doesn’t. I wanted to say
farewell to cold, the rain that finds
rivulets in your bone. But I only know
that some things stop and others
continue, and I can’t help you
make any more sense of it than that.

Prompts: Poetic Asides (dead end) and Imaginary Garden with Real Toads (maypole). And with that, another National Poetry Month comes to an end.

How is it that we are arranged
like a demon made of
stars?
All the spokes of all our
wagon wheels
turning in on themselves;
these are
haphazard arrangements
by which were are made.
It’s a wonder that any of us
is human, or alive
for more than a week,
or able to say much
for ourselves
that has never been heard
before.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (haphazard).

We were in the habit, then,
of eating a Little Debbie Star Crunch
before any major decision.
This was before we realized that they

tasted strangely of raisins
and sweated the package
with heart-clogging fat.

How were we supposed to know?
Our job was to sit on front porches
with poster paint, try not to spill it,

and wonder about things we could sell.

All the smaller informations in it
are not true.
We believe you own a jackal
about as much as we believe you invented popcorn.
You create tiny explosions of falsehood
every time you open your mouth.
After your accident, you became as untrustworthy to us
as intermittent sun through vertical blinds,
catching itself, believing itself uncaught.

Prompt: Poetic Asides (Important ____).