They Will Sew the Blue Sail

FIREWORKS PHOBIA FORMATION | Liz Countryman

Fear deep and joy up over:

dark July forenight.

Shiver sweat not dark but unseen

exploded over the suburban ball.

Come get me, I’m making myself

ready for you every day, Lord,

like they say all these people

here are doing.

This place reminds me of something.

A door opens behind me and I know who it is.

Sitting here’s like saying yes—

All it need do is ask me to touch its arm

at the moment before ignition, when we’re held in expecting:

I know and it knows

me, and a detonation.

Each pair of eyes

follows its story off.

Take a look at me! I have a beautiful arc!

We were together, and we cared about something—

long sheen of a hospital hallway,

spray of islands violent on an ocean,

the light spilled sidewise and the land dried.

The day with its barely open eyelid.

Probably what they lost they lost

fantastically

—it didn’t just hang there.

They watched it,

not the other way around.

I am an attempt to be clear

while burning out

something almost said the incorrect way.

Every time I touch your hand

and every time your hand

falls on my hair too hard.

It’s a draft I discard.

Back in Mom’s lap,

I guess I hid because

they were fake, the flashes.

What reactions from the pleased picnickers.

What a nightmare.

So I’m on the ground

and in the sky and the sky

of me explodes and the ground cowers.

Or does the window of me look in

jealously at my hearth?

Or does the rainforest of me seem not like eco-wonder?

Wave of me pulled out on waves?

Grass is dumb, and waves don’t care.