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House in a Hurricane
Poetry by Seth Michelson
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Excerpts
How it Happens
It’s like this: we wobble
through our days like the homeless,
each of us pushing a cart.
We collect mainly junk:
glass and tin, a dropped earring,
but, if lucky, we’ll find a buck,
dry socks, a perfect rose.
Into our carts it all goes, the sticky
and the stained, a haul
cradled by its metalwork:
swift on three good wheels.
The fourth wheel, though, is stubborn.
It neither spins nor faces straight.
But it's our flaws that enrich us
as someone wise once told me.
And, sure enough, it's that bum wheel
which scrapes the earth
so that we swerve
and slam headlong into one another,
our contents swapped, intermingled:
Your pink hairbrush
on my green bottles, my flannel hat
down at your feet, your scavenged tinsel
in my hair like starlight,
and two ragged lives entwined.
Another Wistful Poem About Heartbreak
Nope! This poem hates poems
about heartbreak and its derivatives:
all the mewking and sniffling,
all the tears and self-pity.
This poem is about Cheetos,
those delectably toxic snacks,
those crispy, orange cheese poofs
all irregular and twisted. Never,
said Heraclitus, can a Cheeto
be eaten twice, for each is unique
in length, shape, and weight,
not to mention the depth of cheese-dust
gently powdering its salty surface.
So while those other poems go on crying
and whimpering to godless skies,
this one makes a crunch
like a roach crushed by a heavy boot.
Driving Fast
Today I smacked a pigeon
with my car’s front bumper, the thwap
of spine on plastic filling the air
with small white feathers.
The world went crooked and nauseous
I stopped my car, jogged
to the bird: flopping
in spastic circles, blood
foaming from its nostrils. One
wing beat the air with fury,
desperate to flee, but the other,
broken, dangled,
a snapped twig.
Then all at once the way an earthquake
splits and swallows a city street,
the bird shuddered and fell
into memory. There it lies,
belly up, eyes open and fixed,
its small pink feet
curled tight as fists
pointing forever at me.
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