White Oil
Iced wires lift like glass-eyed lashes.
Mist whispers in a mine’s deaf ear.
The highway’s brokered openness;
thin winds, blank billboards, shake: two hands.
Why do machines keep us around?
The night’s black market’s freer still.
On, beyond need’s utterness,
vacant cells of home, dividing.
Tazama
Sailboats rock in ice-locked slots.
Dust pollinates a fan’s still bloom.
Rain falls, installing panes of space.
Sky and mind grey, one vast status.
Now we and steel are blank enough
to bear a common heritage.
New plants will thrive, indigenous
to the blueprint’s far, dry shores.
Ninian
Boughs drip down a mine-shaft’s sounding.
Keys press deaf in wooden depths.
Lives pass like shivers through stone homes.
Train-strokes soothe lands off to lead.
We’re building, soft residuum:
sawdust blows from perfect planes.
How long the light will feel then,
when earth is not our closest sphere.
Thomas Sorensen is presently living as a sort of hermit on a lake in Northwestern Ontario while waiting for his green card so he can join his husband in Salt Lake City. His work is forthcoming or has previously appeared in the ASP Bulletin, Filling Station, The Dalhousie Review, the Los Angeles Review, and the Danforth Review, among other venues.
Angel Rust 