​Maybe the City Has More Vaccines

What is the self but an idea of self?

Or two flutes and a harp.

Is truth better than belief?

Or electric guitars?

You’re making it up and making it real.

The tall, shiny icicles become moons or medicines.

One thing becomes another so easily. 
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        
What does the clock capture if it’s not time?

It’s not time.

What is faster than us?

What’s this draped over us?

Waiting

​How do people do it: fall in love, rise to occasions, jump to their deaths?

How can we have this and this and this with no commas between?

This and this are hard for me, but I don’t want anyone to feel sorry for me, so I pretend to be better than I am.

I have this secret fullness of feeling we call love.

And it’s for you.

Reflect me, text me, message me, “I love you too.”
Lesle Lewis’ collections include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (Alice James Books, 2011), A Boot’s a Boot (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014), and Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence Books, 2019). Her chapbook It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium was published by Factory Hollow Press in 2012. She has had poems appear in many journals including American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Hotel Amerika, Mississippi Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street Mudfish, LIT, Pool, jubilat, notnostrums, and Sentence. She lives in New Hampshire.