City=Church

 

by Gary Sloboda

 

 

 

 

Stoned in a glade of moths or comfy in an afghan in the apartment building looking at a photo of stevedores with their heads bashed in by cops: the timelines coo with irrelevance.  As authoritarian elders in high collars brandish cane whips in art deco hallways smelling of figs and burnt milk, their citations enforce upon the sleep of generations the sounds of slaughterhouse geldings, from which we wake, holding our bodies to receive the consciousness of scalding water.  Its cleanliness.  Its routine.  In the streets I wander through, lost by design, the fields of glass upon the high-rise towers reflect and grow wider than the passing skies: vertical black waters beneath the diadem of time in which the migrating geese emerge and drown simultaneously, as if they never die. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work by Gary Sloboda has appeared in Drunken Boat, Glitter Pony, Timber and EOAGH: A Journal of the Arts.  He is currently working on a book length collection of prose poems entitled, “Tremor Philosophies.”  He lives in San Francisco.