I’d rather not go to the golf course

though my elbows are as slick as the rest

of them — cut to ninth where new rolls of soily

skin are grafted to the chiseled hills,

to where oil drips

down forearms

and pools

into white

leather gloves.

champagne gurgles

my voice (cut to before our bodies

were mute) and I stand

unpolished: green-

and-brown-stained.

cut to me in front of the dumpster bins wondering

if it is I who should be (re)used or

recycled or

and I miss the time before the wolf, before the cry,

before I ever knew of numbers or landfills. cut to

Pebble Beach California where

you cannot see the sand it’s so tiled

in dimpled white,

where shiny people launch meteorites

of rubber and zinc and

where, when the geese scream,

it’s called a chorus — a sonata presto agitato

This poem was originally published in Open Minds Quarterly in Spring, 2019.