The ceramic faces along the garden wall
are changing color. Some kind of fungus
probably. Skies have moods. We gave these
to them. Named the rivers. Imagine that.
Amazon Ganges Nile Mississippi. I don't
believe it either. I believe eating a biscuit
on the shore during a work break tastes
better than that same biscuit anywhere else.
I believe the parchment paper holds crumbs
in a way that makes me call them golden.
The raccoons here have tiny human hands—
not healthy human hands but human hands—
and they sort through trash bins for what's still
good and useful, even with toothmarks.
If I'm continuing to make sense it is
because broken hearts rattle in synch.
We measure thresholds by a single candle
on a mountain top far in the distance
from this mountain top. On a clear night.
The sky has backed off. The clouds, our best
ideas. The moon, a buddy. She's been there
all along, answers your emails. You slept
together once but it was better to just be
friends. I'm not even thinking about my own
mountain—green faces around me in the night.
I'm trying to make out the light on
yours that will tell me you're there.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a Pushcart Prize for poetry, a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, a poetry award from Columbia Journal, and a creative nonfiction award from The Florida Review. His poetry appears in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in Syracuse, New York.
Photo credit: Robert Karkowski