New Year’s Eve

All the good poets are dead,

all the ones that mean anything anyways

saving each other seats

and across the broken fence, through a little hole, so small

my fingers are red from prying—

pinched,

trying to view whatever good thing they’ve

found

picking stems from a wooden bowl,

you laugh, I eat

the cherries and taste the flowers they had to be, first

blessing the hands that picked them, the hands that wanted to do other things

in this cruel world that might not mean anything anymore

the work gone into creating fruit

to be so easily devoured

though their taste ends with me

in this glowing room devoted to comfort

as a world burns, as Joan dies,

as we want and want