The bridge in us is sinking even though you ride your bicycle through it. I know it was your favorite way to get around. That it had a sweet little bell and chimed like Sabbath. I see you wearing dresses as you ride while no one tries to glance under your skirt. The Dutch are polite. Unlike our brief dimension of cruelty. I’m sorry we’ve swerved into the sea, but everyone is in the sea rising like plankton & begging to be eaten. I tried to make good on the changes I didn’t plan for—lured honeybees to my net of weeds. That is to say, I planted garden after garden & left each one just as the jasmine opened at night. For our democracy to continue it requires its own neocortex. It needs more than the Rhesus monkey, who has all the pain but not the language to tell of her time in the wilderness, gathering storm. Please take this as a kindness & float back into the Amsterdam you came from. It’s true what they say—mental health is important. Now the hive is buzzing like a public service announcement.
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Danielle Mitchell’s poems have appeared in Freeze Ray, Connotation Press, decomP, and are forthcoming in Harpur Palate, H_NGM_N, and Bellevue Literary Review. She is an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and currently serves as poetry editor of Wherewithal. Danielle lives in Long Beach, California, where she directs The Poetry Lab.
