Amygdala (poem)

Amygdala

Crab work

In a dark inhuman light

Now standing with averted eyes

ushering this treading foot

squelch on the blue-taped snaking cable

A worker in a tie-on vest

clamps and hoists the car pending the revolution

A woman and her elderly mother

don’t suspect

They will ride the spider

They comply in stopping life decades before it ends

And even their compliance is written in the code

“I would,” the worker thinks, “I would…”

See the dogs in the street

Start, bare teeth, rise in a rippling wave

Like fierce banked voltage crossing the face

of a thunderhead

“I would die in the street, if I could not live there

Make my bed on the poison chair”

Molecular reaction bloats and bubbles

like cauliflower

Gathers in your fingerprints like cesium

“I would suffer noxious vapor

that cracks the ligneous structure

I would

Like the mystery of a golden age

Write my name in blood or in

The shifting earth’s thousand eruptions”

Antifreeze and motor oil

the downpour’s cauldron brews in the gutter

And write this

“This is the harvest of a season”

Amygdala

Sacred Science

(2015, Stephanie Foster)