1

Perhaps there is nothing whole in any city.

Push your fingers into the soil—

shattered spoil, sharp spurs, a razored edge,

consumption’s get and awful ornament.
Heineken and Rolling Rock
pitched at a gibbous moon.

(See the moon’s stained shoulder.)
(See the broken bottleneck glinting under the streetlight.)


2

A glass shard driven through a child’s thigh.

Dark-eyed juncos, ruby-crowned kinglets, white-throated sparrows break
against plated glass:

glitter, feathered tesserae,
bright cullet.

The crack in a glass pane travels at 3,000 mph.

Like windows in a burning house, another city shatters.


3

This is the century of glass,
silicon, fiber-optics.

The hidden lens captures the baton’s swing
and the body struggling to get up.

Glass mortared to a brick ledge,
two-way mirrors, beveled peep-holes, the drone’s eye,
broken glass, and riot gear.

Where are the 24,000,000,000 bottles manufactured in 1964?
How many are broken?

An old woman walks head first into a glass door,
the unexpected similarity between one space and another.

Glass weeps—so imagine the sorrow in a tinted window,
in a satellite lens adrift, a rifle scope, a rosary,
in Stein’s carafe, that blind glass,
and in the glass eye turned inward.