from Fake Flowers Last Forever

Zoe Dzunko

The light doesn’t really shimmer
of its own accord; it’s just the dark 
branches shifting back & forth
in front of the glow. As they say, 
knowledge is experience &
these wonders that surround us 
are merely unknowns waiting to be 
found out. You left for work, 
today, with an acid taste & totally 
charged; like the fountainhead of all 
mistakes, damage is in the details:
the tiny erosions of our living. 
Beer money in a washed out jar
of spaghetti sauce; this rattling
under the car’s hood; the nail
you bit down too far. We go out
to the garden we grew & it is effulgent 
with aphids. We climb our way up
to the grandest sights & marvel 
at nothing but how expansive 
loneliness could be. What a vast
& unpopulated forest
, one of us
would say.