Travis Cebula


from Impossible Futures

in another impossible
future, we are sustained
by air and rain.
this is the tree
branch we hang on to.
willows survive
the winter, sage
grows on among stones.
the sun sets and rises
so mountains and
mountains can layer
in acute green
silhouettes. they are
there still, but softening.


     *

I see green spread. slowly out and quickly up. I see bees in the hours of spades and rakes. sun. in times of rest we will take a glass of tea, a pear, share conversations about. forms. you will say spring and I will say storms of mint leaves or the feel of rain as it sprints from a patch of sky-faded denim. you will say clouds and I will say doubt, not today. today is only for water and blue and perhaps. geraniums.

     *

I turn to the last page to see summer end. perhaps a marble curtain falls. this fold obscures. the past, in the beforeground, a cottonwood leaf hangs from your lip. adorned with a single snowflake. something quivers under each breath. something stills. I turn to the last page to find the words to burn meadows brown. sun. the sun is the answer, always, in a blue sky she exhales. the end whimpers between a line of Lincolns clad in matching black. and black shines as if it is wet. but the page says all storms are dry in August. so I turn to the true last. and find only paper laid out for the rain.

     *

goodnight Gertrude
your stein is full
finally
of torn slips
your tongue’s trips

paper’s gasp—
your heavy hands your
slips of poems poems slip your grasp
alas
poems slip
alas alas alas


Travis Cebula is an MFA graduate from the Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University (AKA The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics). He has previously published poems in New American Writing, BlazeVOX, The Talking River Review, Eleven-Eleven, The Strip, Whrrds, Bombay Gin, Dear Sir, The Bathroom, Fact-Simile, and Monkey Puzzle Magazine, among others.
 
 
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