Mark Dunbar
QUELL
The sun’s just up
on the cancer center’s coy prairie swoon
that pocks the mythical landscape
with its ersatz tranquility,
a feather in some architect’s cap.
I wonder what bird got plucked
and whether it will appear to take out my eyes
so that I don’t see these clean clean horizontal lines
just behind the car dealership, the Starbucks
and Dunkin,
or better something more fantastic,
perhaps paranormal, sneaky as a snake
or a mutant piece of DNA.
I’m dodging a fugue state in the parking lot.
I’m thinking of trip wires.
I’m thinking of release,
of microscopic kites spooling out
in malignant formation. Inside,
God is great and merciful.
Shibboleths stretch across walls
waiting for the dark
to whistle back.
In the waiting room, Phil says he’s a banker
though there’s trouble with his accounts.
Joe curses insurance vultures,
and Bob’s asleep.
They are taken away
to the photon machine
and I am left wishing that I’d smuggled
my old self in, the one who knew
how to conjure detachment
from what he carried,
from all the riven show.
Whose legs weren’t metamorphic.
Who quelled.