Once there was a zero, 

a dog running along a beach into a hot-rod skid.
Words can make waves, bring in seaweed 
and jellyfish, bring out lies. The heart 

is like a heifer, large and adoring, assumed to be stupid 
but actually wise, while the mind mingles
between two metal plates 

and a militant vice. I thought talking was a necessary act,
but now, I’m not sure. My old life is out on a hike 
with the Marquis de Sade;

I think they got turned around at Black Diamond. The thing about night:
it’s like a room of prickly artificial plants unless you’re brave enough
to turn on a light,

but a tree can never be a zero, even when it’s been raining, even when you lose 
both your parents in less than the time it takes a fetus 
to go from seahorse to capsuled astronaut. 

Taking out the trash, I run into my Air Marshall neighbor, 
the one with the American flag the size 
of his wrap-around porch. 

It’s a beautiful flag, I think. What’s not to love about all that ambulance,
all that first-responder red, white, and blue? 
We’re all just a bunch of molecules, 

spooked by the dark. Takes one to gnome one. Don’t count your trailer 
before it’s hitched. Liar, liar, country on fire.
Once, there were twenty-thousand species 

of trilobites. They survived four major extinctions, and then there were none. 
Sometimes words come to our rescue.
Sometimes not.

ξ

Martha Silano’s fifth full-length poetry collection, Gravity Assist, appeared from Saturnalia Books in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and the Best American Poetry series, among others. Honors include the North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and the Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award. She teaches at Bellevue College, Seattle’s Hugo House, and as a Poet in the Schools in Skagit County, Washington.