Like Asterisks

David Shook

The newspapers say you’re two packs a day

 

flavored like souvenir cigars: bus exhaust, fruit rot,
soured smoke of boiling hops, trash & burnt plastic

 

limited edition ash fall

 
        *
 

You hide the city like
asterisks hide the us & is of
     fucks & shits

 

like string bikinis cover nipples

 

a sheet-draped mass on the highway shoulder

 
        *
 

Smog flags like riptide warnings at the beach:
stay indoors if red, walk if orange, light sports if
yellow, if green fine

 

never green

 
        *
 

earwax gray,
mucus marbled black


David Shook is a poet, translator, and essayist whose work appears in magazines like Ambit, PN Review, Poetry, and World Literature Today. Kilometer Zero, a poetry documentary he covertly filmed in Equatorial Guinea, is forthcoming in 2012, along with his translation of Mario Bellatin’s Shiki Nagaoka: A Nose for Fiction. He lives in Los Angeles, where he edits Molossus. http://davidshook.net