we’ve been taking walks around the park for survival
without a playground I find myself in loops explaining

to the open field why yellow tape adorns the slide
impedes the swings while ducks and geese continue

like various spoiled boards upturned against a nail
we hit old tie sides with rubber stroller wheels squawking

in a city park made for rails for carting beets to sugar plants
where the city maintenance program parks old trucks now

memorializing those who ghosted water from the west
with those of us still walking circles in the lawn

to neither of you who knows I wonder aloud
what the cavities of orange brickwork must look like

when the factory floors are taken out the smell of sugar
and washed soil softening the rafters where they touched

if the stone isn’t really orange but a worn sienna moon
if when pressed we pass the world on to the dirt

if I am at fault right here with the world that was
I let you continue barefoot in the first warm sun

a nailhead pulling backward through your heel your voice
immediately some emergency of blood becoming copper

on the rails and wailing in the way I first received you
I’m right here I’m here half of comfort is proximity

I am a vice and shoulder when I lift you from the ground
carrying you with your heart against my own

until it slows until you catch your breath your lips
returning rose from worm your blood like sleeves

wrapping linked as elbows around my waist
I’m carrying you back along the road for home

and although it worries me to know the future
of your heel against my shin the alcoholic sting

and tweezing of your body backward from me
while I hold your foot to clean it I work my voice

into a rhythm like the shallows of my hands are
smoothing wrinkles from your sweaty shirt

I pat your back between shoving the empty stroller
through the stones where they haven’t fixed the sidewalk

I tell you about my father pulling splinters from
the center of my fishy little foot when I was young

then how I stood in our gravel driveway testing scars
against the strength to leave the shadows of big clouds

these checkered cumulous like blankets for the plains
to tear apart horizon here they're cutting up the land

I’m worried if one day you’ll leave this could be the season
I remember when it happens when I tell you another story

about foxes leaving burrows with my hands shaped in
the shadows of your nightlight it won't be coincidence

the way the signs for love you are the same as encore
my middle and ring fingers pressed to thumbs for muzzles

ears up as antennas the rest of us our arms their tails
my forearm shadows how we all will be again their shadows

awning between what is right and what will be just distance
in the yellow daffodils and dandelions in short ditches