Continuous

I give the emptiness in my chest to the sky,
sparks in my head to the night, although
I earmark the light in my eyes for the sand
of bay floors where the flounders live.
May my bones’ tiny archways coalesce
in the cool tunnels dug under border walls.
I donate the wishes caught in my throat
to the tongues of kids on hot streets. Songs
in orbit around my heart should be flung
360 to seed the musings of tent-dwellers
alongside the freeways. I send my longings
to fluff up the froth in the heads of beers
in the nowhere-from-here taverns. I offer
my summers’ joys to clear the airways
of little allergic and asthmatic coughers.
Let my horrors add shine to the spiderwebs
toddlers and cats find under end tables.
And may all my spaces return to continuous
with the full breadth of the world. The rest,
the atoms, can play life or dust as they will.

Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and, due out in 2024, Learning to Hold (Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). His fifth chapbook is The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift (winner, Sheila-Na-Gig Chapbook Contest). Recent work appears in Rattle, The Poetry Review, RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, On the Seawall, Solstice, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he’s Editor for the journal Bracken.

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“Continuous” originally appeared in Innisfree Poetry Journal.