Alamo Theory. Josh Bell

your dreams are like — the moon

      now a cross section of bludgeoned tomato

      over the schoolhouse, and now a white pants button

      lost on the highway asphalt. Learning is strictly

      for girls, the guns still going chop-chop-chop,

      and John Keats, in those remaining years,

      he kept sending up his test obituaries

      like weather balloons, poems still floating even now

      over Tulsa and the like, their comely

      bivalve pentameter interfering

      with radio signals, just the reverse

      of the way a beautiful, living body

      can scan so vibrantly it zones out

      all the ghost code, can get between me

      and the important messages

      I should be getting from the underworld,

      one code for another, the dead only interfering

      with the living who’ve interfered

      with the dead, and along those lines

      I really think I’d be suspicious

      of that veggie plate if I were you. It’s strange

      how rarely the meat they serve us

      resembles an animal, and strange how the vegetables,

      despite their cleanliness and grace, so often do:

      a tail or torso of zucchini, and once I saw a rat-shaped eggplant

      hunched feral in a kitchen off Hermosa.

      Look to the sea, as usual, for echoes:

      of course the many benthic cousins

      of the turnip, spindly fruits morphing up their bodies

      for our inspection in unsounded caves

      filled with various see-through creatures

      easily mistaken for prostitutes,