Last Year’s Atrocities (for Bob Bauer)
Persephone Phoenix / Debra Rymer

God dips a pouch of newspapers
between his cheek and gum
ink sinking in, tips his hat back
and squints to the sun

as one by one the obituaries
are absorbed.

Then God spits
all their names out to slip
back in through
layers of the planet’s dead
leaves and seas and fruits
past the mineral trace of melted snows
to dark deep where the earth recalls
our ancestors by DNA and knows our names
even those we never knew.

Mother carries, holds close
her children, decomposing as she
lullabies our bones

among galaxies
ever more
distant.