The Americans

Dear Suburb

3 Dear Suburb, I’m not interested in sadness, just a yard as elder earth, a library of sunflowers battered by the night’s rain. When sliced wide, halved at dawn, I see how you exist, O satellite town, your bright possibility born again in drywall and the diary with the trick lock. For years I slept with my window cracked open, wanting screen-cut threads of rain. Blind suburb, dear untruth, you who already know what I mean when I praise every spared copse, you were my battery, my sad clue, but after I mowed the lawn and watched robins chesting for seeds, I couldn’t resist what hung in the toolshed where, with a pair of garden shears, I cut all the hair from my arms. That need, that scared need to whiten or clean a surface: plywood or lawn, and the spywall behind which I stood, stock-still, and sinned against the fly’s flyness. Though you live inside me, though you laid eggs in the moisture at the corners of my eyes, I still dream about your sinking empire twenty feet above 4 sea level, and the many things you fail to see: beautiful bleached gas can, tomato posts bent into art, how half of a butterfly, cut crosswise, still looks like a butterfly, etc. ...