BUT I AM LIKE AN OLIVE TREE

To eat a bright moth where the maple shrieks
With snakes and rocks and industrial legends
You snarl a belt in the blank daylight

Yeast blue as my illness
Synthetic as beauty (from the shock of a prophet

& I am like an olive tree
At a mallshooting
In north america
Where the bees grow fat with cortisol


PJ Lombardo is a poet from New Jersey. He co-edits GROTTO, a journal of grotesque-surrealist poetics. His work can be found in mercury firs, DREGINALD, Lana Turner Journal, the Brooklyn Rail and elsewhere.