« David Thornbrugh » Six Thousand Years and Counting I am outside evolution like these people slipping pizza menus under doors. Natural selection doesn’t phone out for cheese crust. For me intelligent design ground out lenses in brown plastic frames to bring the playground out of its blur. Suddenly the world snapped into place, rolling grassland to the horizon thick with game, predators cagey from being speared by stone points, fires pulling us close to char the meat we hunted with our perfect vision. Mercy Killing the first sentence you write breaks its back you have to shoot it put it out of its misery but you hesitate you can’t just throw your first born into the idol’s red hot brass jaws you had such great expectations for that first thought you were going to watch it grow up into something grand it was going to ride a bicycle on the first attempt you would have put its art work on the fridge you wanted to help it with its homework you knew you wouldn’t make the same mistakes your parents did with you you would remember the agonies of being alone and helpless without insight about what comes next you would have helped it jump from inkling to full-blown revelation like a mountain goat picking its way up a cliff you just knew that first line was going places it could be president win best actor Oscar all the hopes of a lifetime simmered under that statement with a steady cool blue flame that sentence was the fastest horse in the race you were going to sweep the Derby and the Preakness on its strong back it feels like cancer in the final stages watching it writhe across the page in agony better to close your eyes and pull the trigger quickly You Are Open to the Universe like a lighthouse in the desert blinking comfort at a receding shore line. Himalayan rocks printed with jazz mantras appear in your soup, but you never break your teeth. When you shaved your head, we found a map of India. In airport food courts, distant ice cream makes your teeth ache. You sleep beneath dried leaves from a dozen cities, letters written on rattling trams by starlight. You have the hands of a raccoon intent on washing a fish. There is no snow so white as your sleeping mind, where memories twist and spin like pennies dropped off a high bridge into blue bay waters. You talk to yourself the way sailors on long voyages carved profiles of women and animals into whale teeth, listening to the sounds of creaking rigging, art from the whale’s gaping mouth. You are open to the universe like the door of a church murky with incense and solemn with song. I stand gazing in, pulled by the glint of candles, drawn by the murmur of prayer. Don’t Believe Everything Not everything you read is a word written down. Faces spell pain across a room like a slap. Another stare like that and he’ll deck me. Pretend I’m looking at the wall behind him. Not every fact is factual. Is it really true left and right shoes weren’t created till the 1860s? Centuries of bad feet hobbling cobbled streets even kings and nobility? What were cobblers up to swatting seven with one blow a giant killer barely able to walk? Bathing used to be dangerous just a once a year event was dirt different then capable of keeping people warm? Would water really be considered dangerous when walking in the rain was how people got one place to another? David Thornbrugh is an American poet currently living in Krakow, Poland. Recent publications include Hidden Oak Poetry Journal, Freefall, Prism Quarterly and Slant, a Journal of Poetry.