under pressure

by nina puro

Yes, I did know I was being used, & how. That’s one
of those songs someone’s singing each second.
A seed-tray sprouts in the shed’s darkest corner. Friday ten kids
got shot. Tuesday a hurricane unshucked trees to matchsticks

two counties over. Just now I danced with a girl & when
night breaks, she’ll find another. I can’t align with why I should hurt
my way up…  nor why we ache to rely, & to believe for a moment
time’s malleable, & grows back green, & to forget hunger’s tender

current. Slow star, quick blade. Night doesn’t fall
or break: it seeps like blood plumes in water—as silt,
as cream, as madness seeds wind.  Books are a sheaf
of corpses in the language of the victors. I’m to want to ink 

my name on one in order to eke out my clearing. Houses are hollow
reliquaries built from books. I’m sidling toward the door, a curtain
of 4/4 pulsing at my heels. I throw my career under a bus
whenever possible, but I’ve never wanted to carve my love

into bark. Others have. Men on mountaintops blazed paths
with their white names long after people palmed caves inside mountains
& blew red powder to show where they’d pressed. One removed;
one accrued. Most of what I think about is how to get smaller

so there’s more later. Good days, I’m frightened by this terrible tenderness
tendriling in me: what’s not discharged festers. Maybe I’m not cruel enough
to claw my way into the junkshop’s interior, but I can’t help dismantle the empire
when I’m this stricken: knotting & unknotting my scarf,  trailing my trauma 

to the chip aisle again. I know this: bad nights, every angle’s a wall & shadows blur
but what seems set against us is only itself, breathing quiet. Listen. If trees could talk,
they wouldn’t. That sigh isn’t tree. It’s wind. Driving, your oasis is heat: you’ll have
responses to this & the responses will have responders— the reams of ancestors 

floating between us are who should be addressed. They can’t be repaid. I’ve this long
white debt. Various vistas will sweep around us, glow, get razed.
I should maybe go West for a bit. I’m sorry. The aftermath
of destruction is predictably peculiar. A hurricane, for example: after a flood,

fires start. One goes back. One’s never done.