3 Poems by Lance La Rocque
Heat
All the polar bears in this town
drink gasoline.
It’s in their pee, too,
they think,
how they can escape the accumulation
of matches & lighters—
the fires to come
and to dream
their encumbered bodies
unleashed
down deep
beneath the ocean’s
ice
The Warm Black Sky
When the sparrow
strikes the clear pane
it is afraid and strange
and then elated too
mistaking its fall
into the warm black sky
for its mother’s wings.
Bodies
Once upon a time
The world becomes a rust machine
Not the earth.
God at the gears—
I walk through showers of sparks and red rain
In the monochromatic forests of—
The mother writes a book, I hear,
And look for it
With God’s own discarded tools.
I will make a path with Xs
Scraped all over the ground
Where bodies are said to reach out
If you dig.
