Urgent Care

Having to make eye contact with the economy— A ball cap that says In Dog Years I’m Dead—“The moon will turn blood red and then disappear for awhile,” the TV enthused. Hunched over an anatomy textbook, a student traces a heart over another heart—lunar eclipse. In the bathroom, crayoned graffiti: fuck the ♥ • He collected CAPTCHA, one seat over, Mr. feverish Mange Denied: like puzzling sabbath or street pupas; we shared some recent typos:I’m mediated(his), my tiny bots of stimulation, he loved the smudged and swoony words that proved him human— not a machine trying to infiltrate the servers of the New York Times, from which he launched (gad shakes or hefty lama) obits and exposés, some recipes, a digital pic of someone else’s black disaster, he lobbed links at both of his fathers (step and bio) a few former lovers, a high school coach, a college chum, some people “from where I used to work,” so much info (we both agreed), “The umbra,” the TV explained, shadow the earth was about to make— • ...and if during the parenthesis they felt a strange uneasiness... ...firing rifles and clanging copper pots to rescue the threatened... ...so benighted and hopelessly lost... ...their eyes to the errors... MOON LORE , Farmer’s Almanac. Waiting room, hour two. • Urgent Care. That was pretty multivalent. As in: We really need you to take care of this. We really need you to care for this. To care about this. We really need you to peer through the clinic’s storefront window, on alert for the ballyhooed moon— And there it was. Reddening in its black sock, deep in the middle of the hour, of someone’s nutso-tinsel talk on splendor— My fevered friend. Describing the knocked-out flesh. Each of our heads fitting like a flash drive into the port of a healer’s hands.