2 Poems Corey Green


This poem hasn’t yet had an ultrasound


Sarah says the clipped film reel of the Metro window, its rush
to the next stop, stopping, and rush again and her full bladder pushes

the thousandth locked stall door. But the thousand-and-first
is not a step off the car. It’s the thousand-and-twentieth door,

the nearby bus stop, the second month, not your bladder
wetting what you’re wearing, but your breakfast, which doesn’t roll over

like “morning sickness,” but splats to concrete like, “Shit,” or “Fuck you,”
or both, depending on the gooiness of oatmeal or Katie Couric.

This morning Katie was ambivalent, balancing her bronzed legs under a lilac
quilted skirt against pictures of those who’d swallowed cinder or become

refractions, broken human mirrors when flying metal confused factories
with factory workers—lots of bad luck, centuries maybe.

The oatmeal’s revision swirled with last night’s beets.
Sarah says her family has a history of hyperactivity,

and Mozart’s too busy. Instead she sits in the sunroom at night
and listens to nocturnes and string quartets. A long cello bow

lulls the little one back to his thumb. She reads him poetry and the baby curls
to a fiddlehead. The Romantics she reads because she wants him to feel

about thinking. She’s scared he’ll be a mathematician, or anyone who uses rulers.
Pearl diver she can handle as long as he recognizes no metaphor is forever.



Reasons I’m somewhere between your doorstep and your bedroom



• By cutting off my body at the joints and sending them down
the line, I can fit neatly inside a cardboard box
alongside easy-to-read directions for reassembly.

• Others learn numerically—the buzzer that starts
the conveyer is one notch. The man who pays the rent
watches as hundreds of us notches scurry into equations.

• At each break, coworkers reported a gray cloud
forming directly on the factory roof.
It had moved over the parking lot by work’s end.

• For over an hour, traffic was stalled,
while ambulance workers
pleaded with the jaws of life
to close. They only opened.

• During the news, I lay out in a field
next to my grandfather’s pond.
The birds never landed. Although
I did not see their strings
used to wind down the sun.

• Since A cannot be B, I often lose
consciousness when I drive home.
Passing through your hall
I almost drift off.