ANTHONY SEIDMAN, Tijuana, Baja California

DECENCY

Tomorrow

when the Banker regurgitates

a pound of gristle

a coin of chilled marrow

an ingot of congealed fat

when he shivers

and vomits bile

and crows develop

a keenness for human meat

tomorrow

when the billboards and towers burn

and the Banker chokes

on the last of decent and

renewable resources: oxygen

and the clouds and precipitation and

the torrid chemistry of trout pushingupstream

not to mention the lungs in a poem or thegrowth of whiskers and decay of leaves

that moment of reckoning

that lull between two thunderbolts

that hiatus when the river stands up beforeplunging into the estuary

what unbridled fire

will take up residence in the fist of a manwho knows only

the verb of a machete’s strike?

AFFLUENT

This river opens between the pages

of a journal wherein children color

itineraries for crows, or the shoesbelonging

to parents buried beyond thesmokestacks.

This river twists, froths a glossolalia,currents

slap against rocks, and the river

rises, spreads greenness across thispage.

Men wading into this river sniff

the mud that sticks to the fur of lostdogs,

but they also taste a tooth perforating thegums

of a toddler whose mother has placed him

on the parlor floor, as she fills a potwith water

that had traveled a recirculation

from sierra precipitation, then

became rain driving into a tributary that

now leaps its banks, floods this page,

recedes, sinks into the damp clay ofspring,

snakes a trajectory through pipes and

gurgles from out her kitchen faucet. This river

quenches the thirst of stones, stretches

up cliffs so that those who believe

in miracles behold a waterfall, calligraphy

of mist. This river is the cloud river, the blood

river, the white river that zigzags through

the emptiness between letters, the vortex

humming between two dependent clauses. Thisis

the river that soothes the saintly and mad,

river that runs alongside those who can nolonger

walk, but keep faith in the charity oflocusts,

the nutrients in dirt, the cosmos

ringing inside the almoner’s empty cup.