a pedestrian sonnet, after Kristi Maxwell

小心 ! the small hearted branches float heavy with a fruit of men. Another one stands at the crux, reaching out to shake the branch’s hand. The leaves make a mess of wigs on all the parked cars.

All the potted GRASSES on the balcony throw their hopeful babies out into the wind.

Custard yellow afternoon, good enough to eat. Earlier, I didn’t taste the lemon cake made by the dewy-faced and recently graduated.

The irony of  两个石狮 outside of a s-bucks isn’t lost on me. Roar! 我要一杯冰的拿铁! It’s boiling out.

A pile of rocks moves very slowly up the street. 21, 20, 19, 18, across the walk, the great grey eye watches us all.

What the hell is wrong with the mosquito? Massive wolf jawbone says, SHUSH, SHUSH.

It’s hard to wheel the baby in a wheeless baby carriage. I see her, lulled to sleep and invisibility by the rush of the overpass junction and road.

A nothing quote like, “The architectural bliss of a bank, a castle, and an office building cosplaying as a bird’s nest”.

Moss atrocity, an absolute massacre of fussy green. Don’t you know I, too, love a broom that looks like a bush.

An itch haunts for days, the ankle bone a stage for a warplay. Yet, the braggadocio of ivy on cement, and all the thwacking of a life lived by the hammer, straining to hear the present, distracted from birdsong.

Signs sometimes warn us in languages we don’t speak. The round headed white man looks like he’s dipping his toes in the electric river styx, next to a blue plastic boat that used to float.

The fifth national economic crisis, no, the fifth national economic census. A census is not a crisis, but a crisis is a sort of census.

The church is under construction, no kidding

Sometimes my heart feels like a motorized tricycle piled high with scraps of styrofoam, I have to move quickly, to get out of its way