THE TREES ARE SENESCING, NOT DYING. YOU’RE DYING.

Has anyone been here long enough to love it?
Thirty-three years, and some days repeat already.
I come home and the mailbox is full again:

new credit cards promise liquidity, deals
I’ll love, do not discard me, hello neighbor,
has anyone been here long enough to love it?

On the train, I catch a rectangle of light
that moves like childhood. Branches quake outside
my first home. Even there, the mailbox is full again.

The paper says our presidents are so old
their deaths wouldn’t be a tragedy.
Has anyone been here long enough to love it?

How do you find the questions before
there are consequences to not answering them?
I come home and the mailbox is full again.

Everyone is full of it. I live with the consequences
of not answering them. Has anyone been here long
enough to love it? I come home and
I’m full and I’m full and I’m full.

Jon Sands is a winner of the National Poetry Series, selected for his second poetry collection, It’s Not Magic (Beacon Press, 2019). He is the facilitator of the Emotional Historians workshop, a series of generative writing classes with well over 1000 registrants to date that you can find out more about on IG at www.jonsands.com/emotional-historians. His work has been featured in The New York Times, published in The Rumpus, The Millions, Cortland Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Poetry Foundation, and The Best American Poetry. He is a curator for SupaDupaFresh, a monthly reading series at Cheryl’s Global Soul in Brooklyn, and has received residencies and fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Brooklyn Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, and the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses.