By Sean Corbin

Yorketown

In a beautiful world
there is nothing but redwoods and birch,
ponds and rivers and trickling creeks,
fields of bluegrass and wheat
and purple nettle and daisies,
chickadees and cardinals and grackles
sparkling in sunlight, split-tailed
butterflies and just enough bees
to get on with and dragonflies too,

but this is not a beautiful world—

In a hellscape,
there is nothing but concrete and steel
and smoke and flames belched
from stacks and wires tangling
the skies and engines running
chug chug chug in the dead of night
and politicians on every corner
and preachers too,

but this is not a hellscape—

This is the city,
a touch of tree, a touch of trash,
shadows looming and candles
glowing and vultures circling doves,
diesel trucks racing thoroughbreds
down asphalt, darkness and starlight
and glass and water and spider web
and stop sign and sewage and soft hills.

And somewhere the city is a beautiful world.
And somewhere the city is a hellscape.
And somewhere the city is what it is—

a chip of paint from a portrait,
a flake of bark from a bur oak.

Dance, You Fucker

Dance the dance of snapping turtles,
the dance of moonshine in a speakeasy.

Dance like there is a secret to life
that only you know, a way
to avoid the smog, a way to keep
the candles burning,
a way to stay on the dance floor
when the neon bulbs die.

Move your heels like they’re on fire.
Stroke your arms like you’re about to come.
Loll your head from side to side
like a buoy in a riptide.

Speed up,
body roll,
electric boogaloo slide shuffle.

Dance like the local economy
is on the pelvic-thrust standard.

Dance like a vine around an oak tree.
Dance like a cardinal around its mate.

Dance like the world
has run out of questions.
Dance like your feet
have all the answers.

All My Pasts And Futures

in a city block, pigeons hooting
at French fries in a garbage can,
Cadillacs along the street
spotted with bird shit, fumes
of booze leaking out of windows,
breezes drenched in jazz.
I am steam from a manhole cover
lifting into the air of the city,
spreading over everything,
soaking gravestones and bassinets,
tasting abandoned dinners
and desserts that have not arrived.
I am the polished bronze statue
of Christ and Buddha and Sunshine
Superman, the grime on a bus stop,
the colors of a florist next
to a bustling bodega, a spark
of pigment in a grayscale
that spreads from street to street
like an acrylic plague.
It’s never been darker.
It’s going to be light soon.
Hell is coming.

Sean L Corbin is the author of The Leper Dreams of Snow (Finishing Line Press, 2018). He lives in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, the writer Amanda Kelley Corbin, and their two children.