Value Form

Turned that chicken into a week of meals
the way I turned that memory into ten
years of poems. Ten years of amalgams
of the rain. In cigarettes, six months rent
is a year. Fifty two to live. Mechanic says
five weeks wages to drive another day.
Yesterday, at the gas station a man said;
water boils at 212 degrees,
steam drives trains, you don’t need gas
you want gas. Lord, boil my wages into
rain. Burn my poems into chicken. Lord,
let me eat my car, let me drink the gas,
let me swallow the asphalt that separates
me from my love.


Reprinted from Personal Problem (Grieveland, 2023) with the permission of the author.