Kintsugi
The timing of my addiction
came like the first generation
to know about global warming
and final to chose to do
nothing about it.
Thus it’s become a comedy where
the lungs are afraid to laugh.
Flaccid high-fives, all downhill
on bikes: Summer’s cooling wind
now winter’s sobering weapon…
But December forecasts warm enough for
my grandfather’s reconstructed clay pipe
to keep paying homage with smoke holograms
across the sky as I ride: Truth in the distance,
thinned hawks perched on certain roofs.
Fig Leaves
On the last sips of summer
we all had ballgames to attend
what with the divorce rate
and herpes percentages
never anyone reading
the fine print
the neighbors were drunks
a haboob was brewing
sand grits already lined
our spit as technicolor trees,
unsure of the season,
tried to be everything
to everyone.
Aurophobia
With more than 700 quakes in Colorado since 1867
I hoped for the meanest and most modern one,
before which I’d fill the kitchen sink and grip tight
to her, again finally, as the water turned to gold.
With that gold we’d repair the house and ourselves,
however many high-priced therapists and whiskies
we needed. We’d eat gilded leaves on sandwiches
as our blood came to contain multiple milligrams
of the metal. We’d roll into each other at night,
high from always drinking out of the ocean.
But it wouldn’t be long before gold began to weigh
us down. We’d eventually find out about the study
on wedding ring degradation, the daily abrasion
that left yellow specks everywhere we went.
And a close mutual friend would set us straight
that all the world’s gold, fittable in three pools,
actually came by way of meteor bombardment.
An ounce of gold, beaten into a sheet covering
a hundred square feet: We’d have sheets boarding up
the windows, a gold-barbed fence at the street.
∞
KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Colorado Rockies for The Denver Post. His first two collections of poems, While Dreaming of Diamonds in Wintertime and Selfish Never Get Their Own, are available on Amazon. The Arizona State University alum is on Twitter @KyleNewmanDP and more info and writing samples can be found at kgnewman.com.
