portion of the artwork for Matthew Harrison's poetry

Health
Matthew Harrison

When the furnace-burst of desert wind crusts the trees and gardens and the cars and rooftops and windows and balconies of houses and skyscrapers and prisons and the seesaws and slides and ballparks and traffic lights and roads in the neighborhoods in the districts in the cities and the billboards and telephone wires and shoes noosed by laces to the wires and the Ferris wheels and roller coasters and malls and movie screens and the bridges and lakes and oceans and bays and all safe harbors and the animals and bugs of the air and the ground and coffee mugs left on sidewalk tables and pints in pubs and the monuments and mountains and the stars between clouds and the gravestones with infinite scabs of rust dust at last there will be nothing left for me nothing and I will be nothing for good and nothing will harden into fossils of nothing and break into nothing and I will gust away with bodies blown to nothing leaving nothing behind in funnels of nothing feeding nothing but funnels dissipating to nothing but me and all of us in a final whirlpool suck that nothing will be able to stop or describe or memorialize or dream up or swap with anything but nothing.

For now I swallow a smoothie made with blueberries and wheat germ and carrots and raw beets and apples and protein powder and other good-for-you-shit in a tall drink called an Iron Maiden.

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FRiGG: A Magazine of Fiction and Poetry | Issue 41 | Summer 2013