If You Aren’t Busy I Think I’m on Fire

by Wendy Xu

Cody might be right about the end of the world. If we performed
an elaborate ritual to prevent it, who could say
we didn’t succeed? The deer live on to cause another traffic jam,
white tails flaring in the sun. There is no way to disprove
you are infinite. I walk into a yellow house and a calendar
says 1973; the ceilings are dragging wires from room
to empty room. If we ordered the total destruction of other people,
would we still need other people? Sunlight coming down
like a yellow tambourine of leaves.

Wendy Xu is the author of THE HERO POEMS, a chapbook forthcoming from H_NGM_N BKS in 2011. Selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of the 2011 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, her work has appeared, or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Journal, ANTI-, CutBank, Drunken Boat, MAKE, InDigest, PANK, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder and co-editor of iO: A Journal of New American Poetry and curates the collaborative book-review project READ THIS AWESOME BOOK.