A Girl Is Standing Roadside Selling Live Grenades Painted as Apples

When I was young I called a rock
a kiss and planted it on the temple
of a friend, hard. And while he was lying
unconscious, bleeding, I said he was
only in love. Sartre told us that
all objects are space we chose to name.
The weight and shape of a sleeping baby
is the thirsty silhouette of a hawk’s beak.
A handful of sand is a stranger
at the far end of the bar. Sartre himself
was the cutout of a bat in the pitch
nights of hell, like us, calibrated
by what we bump against in the dark,
nothing on nothing, a chalk outline
at the crime scene. And this
that you are reading is a silent sketch
of spite or better, abandonment,
an open door, a deep black forest
bristling in the core of the earth.

-Matthew Zingg, via