by Lawrence Bridges

We work for Kronos Seam Capture
and Affiliates, specializing in bending time
into a line-chasm where responsible
and opportunistic adults and teens fall
each workday. The seam looks like headlights
on trees in an early morning January commute
or postponed and frozen home tasks
for the remoters when they finally smell the coffee.
Harrowingly, artists play the fall
like a rack of chords plucked by gears—
the majority envy their dives over and in
but have little knowledge of their crashes
because this is a violent game, endangered
by height and gravity, though beautiful
and defining of happiness’s highest pursuits:
keyboard keys, door handles, coughs clearing throats,
buttons in clean shirts, happy talk downstairs,
gossip, rolling up doors, musical iron gates,
bus breaths, subway “eeks,” children running
to classes with tiny planes laboring overhead.
We all fall down into the seam—even in our
dream before the time changes, and it’s
too dark and cold out to start the car.

Lawrence Bridges‘ poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Tampa Review. He has published three volumes of poetry: Horses on Drums (Red Hen Press, 2006), Flip Days (Red Hen Press, 2009), and Brownwood (Tupelo Press, 2016). He lives in Los Angeles. You can find him on IG: @larrybridges.