what if the grass grew tall and ambled over to a car, parked in a tow zone in the early morning,
windows slick with dew,
and whispered something soft and old,
the kind of thing that makes men walk into the woods in their underwear and survive, that
makes little girls grow roots that’ll trip you if you don’t listen to the earth when you step,
and the car, black, from before cars got complicated,
wise but not smart,
wept, burst its tires
sunk into the asphalt,
metal screaming in grief the violence it took to be made,
and the other cars, upon hearing this,
did the same, and the neighborhood, woken too early, step onto their porches
which, of course, have been whispering with the grass, scheming,
their doors locking behind them,
and, looking at each other, at the cars,
at our locked houses,
and you smoke a cigarette and we get to know these people
who maybe we haven’t talked to before, or maybe we have,
and the sun is higher, we’re all getting hungry,
our houses
frustrated, bang and scream, the doors stay locked,
we start talking
apologize for the ways we’ve let the wood rot,
the roof leak
for the spills we never cleaned up
the doors open,
and, after calling in sick to work and finding out that
there is no work now,
“didn’t you hear? there’s
grass on the interstate and a tree through the white house,
the first east-coast redwood,
which, being a miracle, sprung from the earth grafted
with a thousand other trees
bearing fruit”
what if now we take the food from our fridges
no power, it’s going to turn anyway,
make fires in the street from tax returns, parking tickets,
cook what we can, start compost piles with what’s left, eat and eat
follow our cars
now miles beneath the earth, returning to the core,
and break through asphalt to reveal soil, sad and lonely and glad to be turned again,
then sowed with seeds someone had in their cupboard,
and what if we invite the next block over, and the next, and now there’s our friends, tuba and snare and guitar and washboard and saw and five-gallon-bucket kick drum and bare feet on fresh soil going pat-pat-pat
pat-pat-pat and dust in the air and the little ones laughing
what if now the sun is setting and we’re dancing, and the fires burn brighter, and there
are no sirens tonight, no lights racing down streets, and
someone finds, in the gun above his mantle
bullets filled with seeds and
vines growing through the barrel,
the trigger soft and mossy,
so we know that it’s only fireworks even if we don’t see the colors,
their lights and the stars are all that’s glowing
