Pieces
Alan Elyshevitz


We take some notes from popular music and splice them
into a foreign war; excise clauses from the law and glue
them as reminders to windshields; sample the core
for a festival of bubbles; crumble the largest rocks
to find their geological clocks; siphon a drop of riparian
water which disappears on a thin disk of glass; skim
an entire prairie dead; deconstruct the chickens and bring
them home to freeze; pull apart the diets of immigrants,
increasing their expense; hyphenate every citizen into
matricide and patricide; isolate a cardiac rhythm and beat
the life from its graph; scope the old for moral decay; slice
the human mind for an analytical sandwich. Who are we,
presumed astute, piecing the pieces with the preoccupation
of a child who doesn’t yet know what she’s made of?
Picture
Berna Özlem Özcan, Doubtful Minds