Thief

My mother comes out of her room with her wheel walker
at the same moment a polar bear appears on the living room TV.
I adjust my ski mask and watch as it swims in the ocean
beneath pieces of melting glaciers like the fading ruins 
of a frozen sepulcher floating inside an ice bowl of liquid gray matter.
If it doesn’t find land soon, it will drown. RA is known to cut
years off of someone’s life. So, I’m on bank-robber time now.
I even keep digital watches sewn into the backs of my gloves.
My mother says she wants me to take a picture of the doves
outside, which I’ve never seen. I’ve only heard them in my dreams.
Instead, I summon a tree full of blackbirds like spots
on the lungs of an unknown god missing in action. Like my mother,
if you ripped my body to pieces, you’d discover that my shadow
is missing. And if you cracked my skull open,
you’d find a pinecone fossilized in the blue yolk of my childhood.

ξ

Anuel Rodriguez is a Mexican-American poet living in the San Francisco Bay Area. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Cincinnati Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, PANK, decomP, Blackbird, and elsewhere.