All I want for Christmas is June

by | Feb 4, 2020 | Issue Thirteen, Poetry

And March through May before it.                            
The turkeys pardoned by the president

this year are named Bread & Butter.
I try to remember emperors

who would move to summer houses
before it snowed.

In family, we never labelled our utensils.
Father could tell the old & new milks apart

like beads of abacus.
Atacama is often compared to Mars,

yet around a million people call it home,
crowding into littoral fishing villages,

mining areas and oasis towns,
growing olives, tomatoes, cucumbers,

herding alpacas. I pore over the atlas
seeking another city, marshy & porous

against your asphalt; in my chest your land-
locked body foaming a saltwater craving

of absent coastlines, of mats of nothing
but free-floating sargassum.

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