Donny Winter
The World Still Spins
We hide behind our battened hatches
ready for walls to tumble (inside ourselves) while we’re
painfully aware that the world still spins.
We loom behind our windows and watch
the days that pass (on the outside) until they
shrink into portholes too bright for our eyes.
We tire as the sun droops westward,
worry of the hordes we keep (there’s never enough), and fear
the shadow-titans that stretch across the floor.
We see ourselves insects trapped in amber
as dusk sees through us (in overexposed sunlight), and
the robin sits high on the line, still singing:
“don’t worry, you’re not going to die.”
The world keeps its spin while the rivers steer
clean routes through [un]littered woods
and we, sanitized and scared, dream our homes sarcophagi
—Submitted on 03/25/2020
Donny Winter‘s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Central Review, Flypaper Magazine, and Sonder Midwest. An LGBTQIA+ activist and YouTube blogger from West Branch, Mich., he teaches creative writing at Delta College, a Community college in University Center, Mich.
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