For Those Who Have Sacrificed in the Streets of Minneapolis

“Your Lifetime is a Knife”

–after Mary Oliver on Keats      

Your lifetime is a knife.
You could eat a plum,
peel the darkly sour sun;
or brandish it daily just
because you can; or hide it
each time thugs shove past;
or join them; or gaze forever
at your reflection in the blade,
testing different smiles;
or prick a beloved each time
you’re afraid; or yourself just to feel
god-made.

Your lifetime is a knife.
Do you slice vegetables for children.
Or inflate tiny balloons inside obstructed veins.
Or whittle all ten fingers at some elaborate slot machine.
Or make origami cranes and papier-mâché.
Or slash tires and good names.
Do you tattoo mythical beasts by blue neon
across atmospheres of skin and souls.
Or rust, in doubt, all alone.
Or forge a new school from bamboo.
Or open junk mail instead
of writing postcards that all end, I love you.

Your lifetime is just one knife.
You won’t get all your musical potential
twice—or your silence. My knife
greets your knife not to clash,
but spark over gathered branches
on a cold, dark night. Your knife
greets my knife years from now
stuck in a newly fertile field.

Many lifetimes bound together
form not thousands of knives, but a spiritual
engine. In front of a hospital,
before masked men armed with guns,
I saw an old woman in a wheelchair, her eyes
closed, holding her phone’s lens
like a knife in the air. Lightning
but a broken toothpick compared.

Your lifetime is a knife.
Do you hunt in zoos, feed only the fed.
Or do you wander each dawn
back through a graveyard
of dreams whose flowers
eat the dead.

–Rest in poetry Renee Good, Minneapolis

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“Civilization”

–RIP Alex Pretti

In every moment exist two doors.
One leads eventually to the sea; the other

to a dark forest. I like mountains
and have read many books about mountains.

From the peak of a great mountain
you can see any ocean turn

tranquil, and even tiny forests with birds
thrive grand. Yet I have never

really left the city, my city, our city.
It wends on and on forever

in your hands and mine.