by Brendan Joyce
The breeze through the sycamore trees’ sickly leaves
that screams worsening working conditions,
the squirrel taunting the cat from its
clicking perch, the possums hunting rats
below in the arson lot, the rats getting hunted, the cloud
of bats rising from the school’s roof into October
orange cloud cover, the spider sewing its night
against a security light, the raccoons casing
the attic windows, the millipede ducking a
stream of piss in the urinal, the mouse ripping
its leg off in the glue trap, the dog singing its song
to the whole block of dogs, even the moon in its sorry
state of endless retort—hates cops too, you are not alone.
The forest, my comrade, whispers: “I am full of cops. I am
on fire. They have names & addresses & a growing list of
co-conspirators, go, find them. Settle my debt.
Say my name.”
Brendan Joyce is a busboy from Cleveland, Ohio. He is also the author of Character Limit (self-published), a collection of poems that uses Twitter’s character limit as a poetic form. He’s currently working on a collection of poems titled Leave Land.
