By Andrew Hemmert

So now my neighbor’s twelve-foot skeletons are all-season haunts,
this February morning holding huge pink balloon hearts
and grimacing against the freezing fog. I like them
this way, memento mori-ing my Tuesday commute,
though who really needs to be reminded of their own death
these days? In the shed we found a mouse corpse hollowed out
by weather and time. The body otherwise left intact—
a kingdom of obsidian abandoned in a jungle.
Love, I think, is a kingdom of obsidian I have
thus far refused to abandon to death’s jungle, though there
of course is time for everything to go wrong, or more wrong,
or wrong enough. Ice on the road, another driver running
the red, the sky a white sheet over my body. Until then
the skeleton in me is offering you its balloon heart.

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Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.