AT OUR DISPOSAL

                    by Jeff Sirkin 

I’m always coming up short, on my knees, peeking through the glass at the progress on the empty house next door. Sagging shelves and appliances in the driveway, birds popping in and out of the sage out front, blooming purple, the recently bared roots in the yard plotting their way under the foundation, under the soiled carpets and the discarded satellite dish and the light streaming in. There’s a word for that, something about all this noise weaponized against us, this slow asphyxiation called screen time. I try to find the definition, the company logos flickering faster than the eye can see. The wings of an owl, the belly of a penguin, the nose of a kingfisher, the idea and the process sliding with me into the dispose-all. There’s black smoke rippling over the border for the third time in three days, and while we weren’t looking the girls next door disappeared. So where do we go to treat all these wounded, the child soldiers hiding behind their weapons in the playground? And when we rise, what world will we slip on, tilting into the wind? There is no order to what we might lose there, the layered surfaces and their treasures caught up in the breeze, a fortune in backlit devices. The playmates are jumping into the water, hand-in-hand, again and again. But these are the words to be used as evidence, all this torn flesh born into its own smoldering transfiguration, these hazy pictures bleeding into the cloudless sky.






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​Jeff Sirkin grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and he is the author of the poetry collection Travelers Aid Society. His work has appeared in Mandorla; Forklift, Ohio; Puerto del Sol, SplitLevel Journal, the Volta and elsewhere. Co-editor of the online poetry journal A DOZEN NOTHING, he currently teaches in the Creative Writing Department at the University of Texas, El Paso, where he also co-curates the Dishonest Mailman Reading Series. He will happily be voting for Beto O’Rourke this week, and he encourages you to do the same if you can.