Two Poems | Pearson Prudent

Casino

1.
Continent of seat people
in the salat of coming up short.
Finger to the button 
like leaf’s dawn wave: 
hardly wind when the winning
still sleeps.

2. 
In indoor noon, they slump
like the airlifted saved in baskets
who, in later news footage,
seemed to have enjoyed the view.

3.
Chance: its digital gloaming, 
its vast singing bowl and cricket racket– 
by chance, I take dirt roads
to house money, follow the forlorn river 
with pockets full of hand.

4. 
The sun’s way with water, 
stochastic and fair until sunset 
when slots unsparkle 
to fuchsias and blues, moon’s illumed moon.

5.
Let what is rigged and lives in the ceiling
tuck me in and whisper, today you were lucky.
Knuckle-crested under diamond-stitched quilt
of balsamroot and lupine, of wild bergamot,
of grass widows and this meadow of names,
let me sleep as some do:
for the fun of it. 

To My Sister

In the pit of light’s candle, we reef
luxury’s undersea and family in the pull
   of liquid black:
        our brother plays with the salt,
          mom is shouldered as the bottles.

They say these rich want
         their beach sand white as
         plumes glooming by their going as
         city park fountain spray, 
                 but the white that windows your face? 
                     Shows through bellying curtains your empty room—
                            you – out to town 
                     for the certain work of coffee and plums?
            Running away in this world are errands in ours.

Mom had a fiction once:  
                something of a waterfall’s white sheet   in its moveless feet
           she’s some drowned penny wished-upon 

               We read it          we called it morbid      
                    called it all too wet
                                                and still took its path.