The Ragtag Flare Group

A song that weighs 100 pounds on Earth would weigh just 20 on the moon.
The voice with which you sing it and the lute with which you play it aren’t weightless.

Song survives the virus but is changed by the face of the virus, such that it wears
the virus face. Parents come out of their houses like children in dresses,

trailing their children. And what of the sound that the moon makes? The moon
with its face. I don’t trust you, he says to the moon. I don’t trust you either —

that’s fine, the blue boy says. Why so tired all the time? We’ve been here
for 2,000 years, and it’s good to get a number after such a long time on the subway

with your hands on the steel. Kind of like a blacksmith flying down a cart
through a mine somewhere that his fathers and theirs had already cleared out,

trying to look a bit purposeful, putting on a grimace or a confident smile
as the mother and her children take their seats. It’s time for a lifetime performance

of the blacksmith on the subway teleported from about 400 CE. Numbers!
The moon loves numbers. The moon is cold and blue. Life isn’t weightless, just less.

ξ

David Kutz-Marks is the author of Violin Playing Herself in a Mirror (University of Massachusetts Press 2015), winner of the 2014 Juniper Prize for Poetry. Recent poems appear in The New Yorker, Boston Review, jubilat, and other venues. David serves on the faculty of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.