The moonlight double parked.
The heavy snowfall tried to evade pointed fingers.
The city maintained its inability to clear
coyote footprints from the neighborhoods.
Dissembling after a newscast, the mayor
bombards geodesic capped sparrow nests
with barbed political pollen balls
coughed upon the streets
instead of salt crystals or cinders
from the city’s orange plows.
Thus the ticket on the moonlight’s windshield
transmutes its hues to that of flypaper
stuck to a stray chow’s black tongue
touched with three long horsetail hair strands.
A shovel pitches in, then pitches out,
builds mounds where moles died out a century ago
from the steam railroad’s illegal dumping
of excess creosote and toothache medicine.
copyright © 2018 Kenneth P. Gurney
