Paleontology

I step from the airplane. My hair melts dead air. I walk quickly: click-clunk, click-clunk, click-clunk. Barbara Jordan, bronze and sober, glasses poised, the last me I’ll see for three more days and three more days forever. Outside I slow the click-clunk to a three-sound crawl: clickclickclunk &etc. I am a woolly mammoth waiting at the cab stand. I am a woolly mammoth stuffed into a cab. I bear the long silence of my own extinction through the rear view. My head on the back seat: horns akimbo: I melt dead air. Blame humans for the loss of large mammals like myself, a new study suggests. The cabbie is my cousin. My cousin carts my husk to my diorama. The radio blares: “The tide is high.” The radio sings: “I’m gonna be your number one.”

Third law

Each September we suck coffee down like arsenic.
Tony vanishes through the annex bowel. Again.
Chain split vowels give me away like television.
Each café blazes to approximate ash.
Teevees rush the streets on their own two feet.
Air pockets meet hush meet crush meet moan.
We eat our phones.