It’s hard to see beyond the drizzling winters.
Restaurants closing.
Apartments falling into the street at night,
without noise.
And after the naming
of the deserted pigeon parks,
the people listen to the anti-
ratflight podcasts:
let the fetuses live,
let them be born and told
there will be nothing
but a life of school followed by a life of hiding.
I always think I hear screams on the moon.
Or the rain that’s lost there.
Maybe it’s where catamites conceive and are born.
Maybe they don’t believe in the Earth,
its gazing wound of snow and wind
that can’t be proven.
An Asperger’s teenager
dismantles the thoughts of the one who said,
“Tell me what you are, I do not know what you are”
upon his shaky walk-by.
And on a world
of subtle lightning mountains
that do not end,
he copies and pastes the spinal foliage,
adding color, thinking he, too, can create summer.
A woman shivers
from the face he uses for “hello,”
and quickly turns away
because she can see them there,
in his shallow troughs of worry,
the only angels left,
scavenging.
Rob Cook’s most recent book is The Charnel House on Joyce Kilmer Avenue (Rain Mountain Press, 2018). His work has appeared or will appear in Epiphany, Notre Dame Review, Harvard Review, great weather for Media, Rhino, Caliban, deComp, Interim, On the Seawall, Borderlands, Barren, The Bitter Oleander, Hotel Amerika, Birmingham Poetry Review, The Antioch Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others. He is currently working on a novella.