ON COMPOSING MYSELF LIKE AN EXODUS OF BALLOON ANIMALS
It’s taking my entire life to break open
like a coconut against this world’s bluff
When I empty quick as myself at last call
it’s not the spaced stools I forget
but the laws of gravity & conduct slow
as the grace of rupturing nests splurging spores
of sea turtles & miniature waterways
As if God dropped her pearls just to give face
to proliferation (& we all feel the fisher’s hook
in already troublesome sandbars like arm’s length
fashioning us one grain at a time) & we all know
the dangers of this bestiary food chain
consuming umbilicus & all
Well I guess this is the living I was warned of
wincing at peroxide’s talk of psychology
& algae chasing me around the kitchen table
with tweezers I mistook for a hungry beak
Given enough minutes I sculpted a moat
against ghost crabs & aerial assaults & accidentally
everything else
My body’s become a skipping stone stationed
in a chest of drawers painted into the fib of all these
needlepoint stars although I’m also down here
with my schematics on helium & trajectories
& what it’d take to levitate like the moon swimming
what I imagine as the ocean imagining ocean
uncollapsible as invisible infinite
Ethan Phibbs is a poet born in central Illinois. His verse has appeared in Heartwood Literary Magazine, Unbroken Journal, Eunoia Review, and elsewhere.