Matt Mitchell

Carbon Footprint, Northern California
  (A poem for alarming times, with word borrowings from
  Johns Milton, Fogarty, and Keats)

  Hot Lot

  Going out of business sale, Arden Way
  Soccer balls, jump ropes, Quench gum, lemon and grape
  All just cream pies in a painting by Thiebaud
  Fat strokes of optimistic white nineteen sixties
  Now sun-bleached, cracked as Trumpish brain folds

  I wonder, still I wonder, who stopped the rain
  ‘Cause around here someone did, that’s plain
  Decades of weight on the gas pedals of our
  Thing-lust motors ‘til heat of our porny fantasies
  Begets this fire sale rising from hot blacktop

  Hot Yosemite

  Silent ditties emit from far off foam
  Granitic vulva, imagined splashes, moans
  Water rocks freaked in black stripes of summer heat
  Tawny orange global warming burning cracks
  In terror cliff, Zen rock, half-breast Half Dome
  Carry more and more far off memories of whitest snow

  Vernal flowers adorn May dogwoods
  But no daffadillies, no musk rose, among the crow toe
  Tracks in soft dust, where forest pastures
  Once rolled, now gone in blazes of flowing flame
  Little beetles run in whelming tides
  Up down hapless stressed out sunburned tree skin

  Hot Body

  When does it become not OK, to continue to be hungry?
  Fortunate sons of this fecund, round-bellied, naughty
  Earth-orb ignore how even her strong, lovely body
  Can have enough internal combustions
  Enough fossil fuel age privileges of stuff and speed
  And speed and stuff and too easy freedom

  Close bosom friend, she has long been
  To the late summer sun, but now somehow
  Our cleverness and clarity and insight Apollonian
  Rots inwardly, and fearful contagion foul
  From the speech of the wolf strangely sways the sheep
  Heedless now of sun’s excess on earth’s clever freckled face








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