Urgent Care

Having to make eye contact
with the economy—

A ball cap that says
In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon

will turn blood red and then
disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched

over an anatomy textbook, a student
traces a heart

over another heart—lunar eclipse.

In the bathroom, crayoned
graffiti:
fuck the ?

***

He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over,
Mr. feverish Mange Denied:

like puzzling sabbath or
street pupas; we shared

some recent typos: I’m
mediated (his), my tiny bots

of stimulation, he
loved the smudged

and swoony words that proved him
human—

not a machine trying to infiltrate
the servers

of the New York Times, from which he launched
(gad shakes or hefty lama)

obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s
black disaster, he

lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio)
a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum,
some people

“from where I used to work,” so much info
(we both agreed), “The umbra,”

the TV explained, shadow
the earth was about to make—

***

. . . and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness . . .

. . . firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened . . .

. . . so benighted and hopelessly lost . . .

. . . their eyes to the errors . . .

MOON LORE, Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room,
hour two.

***

Urgent Care. That was pretty
multivalent. As in:

We really need you to take care of this.
We really need you

to care for this.
To care about this. We really need you

to peer through the clinic’s
storefront window, on alert

for the ballyhooed moon—

And there it was. Reddening

in its black sock, deep
in the middle of the hour, of someone’s

nutso-tinsel talk on splendor—

My fevered friend. Describing

the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads
fitting like a flash drive

into the port of a healer’s hands.