Brooklyn, New York—

babies and gin and church,

you're raggedy as a roach, you eat the holes out of donuts.

A green translucence,

unlean against our hearts

to salvage what is salvageable

*

I'm gonna kill somebody today

to help her,

right in the heart of the neighborhood

a smashed nest

Do we now?

We both do.

You’ll hear their feet.

Heads stuck in refrigerators,

the mob doesn't listen, they will not be moved.

Folks, young and old, begin to get in the water and play.

Rainbow-sweet thrill.

*

This is our home

we’re their instruments

unperverse.

A collapse, perhaps—

let less happen.

He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

Waaaake up!

The streets are filled with kids playing.

Let it be broke.

Andrew Beckett Gibson lives and works in Carrboro, NC. You can find his previous work in Bookends Review and Heartwood Literary Magazine. He has just started his third year teaching and loves to have fun outdoors when time permits!

Zebulon Huset is a teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Rattle, The Southern Review, Fence, and Atlanta Review among others. He also publishes the writing prompt blog Notebooking Daily, and edits the literary journal Coastal Shelf.