1. To nothing and back

Nothing breathes here, where ice slides off
and disappears. The navy sky does not sing; it is full
of unfocused nothing—the air, weak from only carrying the sound
of ice losing itself while Erosion our mother
hurries everything to its future self.
Nothing is so heavy; ice only knows to shatter itself
and float in pieces under the sag of the blue sky,
God’s blue head facing away,
away.

2. Toy gun

See how the littlest one holds it, points it at his sister’s head as she thinks about her markers, her advertisement to the world. Quiero ser la policia. She raises the sign for her mother’s camera and waits for its bright blink, the settling of everything into the long stillness of a photograph.

Her brother has fired and fired; he is laughing. His sister says the policia never laugh with their guns out. And here the two children play, and there, not five miles south their father rolls around in the dirt reaching for knives and necks and life.

3. A gray shrub in a field of rye

waits
for anything; proof
of existence
or to under-
stand why
the tiny lips
of its roots
suck the earth
alone.