DISSOCIATION by Mair Allen

In my cupboard is a collection of coffee mugs, designed in the eighties,

sold at tourist stands and second hand stores. Hairline-fractured

ceramics of soon to be submerged skylines: HOUSTON

in red script over the outline of a city

the future will dive to strip copper from. I live now

in a house nestled in a city nestled in fields of wheat, corn, and soy.

Far from the coasts I imagine a connection to the ocean

like someone in a long distance relationship. We aren’t together enough

for me to construct it as a subject. It’s beautiful mostly in its potential

to consume, like all the great romances. Here in the middle

the biome shifts faster than anywhere, but the land stays where I leave it.

I was born with a mouth of spring-thaw earth flecked with arsenic

and red clover and maybe there is a sea cliff somewhere

in my blood but fear is what roots me. To love and imagine only the worst,

dream of my dog trapped on a roof after the flood, is just like me.

I don’t even have a dog. I keep sketches of cities

I’ll never know: A watercolor of deco neon-sign glow in smooth walled Miami,

fuzzy photo of New Orleans’ feather-strewn streets, postcards

from a Manhattan gallery with a red rotary phone on a pedestal that calls dead poets,

a print of the ship-shaped Amsterdam museum tilting into the break.