Adam Scheffler
What To Fear
The chances of being killed by a refugee terrorist in the United States is 1 in 3.6 billion per year.
—Politifact
If you were rational,
you would run screaming from burgers,
fried foods would haunt your
dreams full of their voodoo ketchup
drip, stealing your years with the
witchcraft crinkle of their wrappers.
If you were rational, you would
tiptoe past Cinnabons like
landmines, keep your liquor in a
black site on an unreachable shelf,
do word puzzles so your brain
might outfox the wolf of Alzheimer’s.
Or, since you are twice as likely
to kill yourself as to be killed—
put yourself on a watchlist, cross
the street to avoid your own shadow,
tie mittens to your hands, those
double agents, so they can’t clutch
a trigger, or cinch a noose. All of us
immigrants from the land of death.
To My Two Legs
Half a horse,
most trusted part of me,
you’ve carried me, I calculated,
two-and-a-half times round the earth,
to where I sit here
with you folded up beneath
me, humble hairy wings.
I want to tell you your
faith in incremental progress
is breathtaking, whatever
state you are in, stop or go,
you are in it utterly,
as when I lie down at night and you
vanish, connected to me
only by the thinnest thread,
the silk leash of my spine.
Look, I promise not to be so arrogant.
I know the gift of verticality is
temporary; I know that I lean on
you too much, like a friend
I call whenever I’m bored,
but how could I not? You—
who’ve given me paths,
helped buoy me up in water,
or let me soar on a bicycle,
your adaptability endless—
have also held me for hours of dancing,
which is just a wobbling of you,
or pressed me between another’s.
You: like flirtatious fault lines
sparking, like shimmying
tambourines or gourds.
Nocturne
I hate New York in the daytime,
grim dried oyster shells stacked
red bricks of gray heaps—
But oh at night,
in an apartment with the lights clicked off
and the shades pulled up—to the lights,
then it’s like
landing in a field of stars—
then, to wander through rooms,
to fix a snack, to crunch and munch
twiggy bones of brittle dark
is to glimpse at last the plenitude
of our secret selves, eyes that
glitter, hands that don’t extend.