In the city of dreams no one dies
-Maria Mazziotti Gillan
There’s a storm gathering in my attic:
Pokémon cards, old novels, broken lamps
and art projects, paint chips flaking to the floor,
that picture of my younger self that haunts me.
Among the fears I have, death still tops
the list. A homeopath once told me
let the mystery be. Good advice but I can’t
help wanting to lift the tent flap to see
the next act.
The holidays don’t help either,
they’re like mile markers
or one of those movie flip books.
Somewhere the long-gone pets
I’ve had are all waiting in a receiving line.
Even though I carry the dead in my pocket,
I carry little victories as well: a poem I published,
a class I taught, a few laughs with an old friend.
Once I dreamed that the folks who make up heaven
were sitting down to eat the earth for dinner,
and God, who always gets first dibs,
pushed his plate back after one bite.
That’s enough, he said. They never get it right
down there. Always too much oil.
Kevin Carey’s books include the poetry collections: The One Fifteen to Penn Station, Jesus Was a Homeboy, Set in Stone, the co-written Olympus Heights, and the collaboration Revere Beach Stories: Poems and Photographs, and three books of fiction: The Beach People, Murder in the Marsh and Junior Miles and the Junkman which won the Paterson Prize for Books for Young Readers and has been chosen for the Pen Faulkner Writers in the Schools Program in Washington, DC. Kevin is the co-founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and a recent finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction.
