Poems by Stacy Black

BY CHANCE OR NATURE’S CHANGING COURSE UNTRIMM’D

You ride an ordinary wave of pain.
You live. Others
are annihilated

by aliens, by love, by the government.
You read your fortune in an alley
in a dried splatter of gunk:

You’ll be going away on a long trip!
You pack your life into a cardboard box
going soft at the corners,

tape it all up and take it into the attic
where there are no days or nights.
You live. You marry

the first mannequin you meet.
Your life together lasts a long time, waiting
for the mail to come.


OBLIVION

Experts predict California to burn again this year
because California is beautiful that is its destiny
or so I’m told
by everybody, the movies and ancient scrolls

I have spent my life unearthing from beneath your sleeping form
like an angel beached on the shores of this world.
I live in a city with a medium-high amount of murder
and violent crime,

far away from the sea.
You can talk about love if you want.
Or New York, I guess.


POSTERITY

You were there, slipping
through time and space
and wiping the white dust

of antiquity from your phone
as Rome burned and doctors
began bleeding George Washington.

You tried telling him about
his great white obelisk,
and how there’d come a time

when no one in America
would carry cash. Later,
Rimbaud flipped you the bird.