Days chorus.
Sonia knows this
in the way she describes
breakfast, the dead
routine of minutes lit
by how quickly a room
of kindergarteners can eat.
The dream is sated
so how to return?
We check sandstone
on a hike
by how it crumbles;
Alma, hands in earth,
sings along.
No I’m Alma
not a fruit bat
sez Alma,
jutting her lip. We know
warm hugs produce
safety or art,
so it feels real.
This morning, today
began w wasps
ferrying dirt to build
a dream & Sonia
knew what I didn’t:
that we snuggled somehow
in the night.
In a west
coast world, stardown
insignia’s muted click-
rate buffers in pre-
everywhere abjection.
Warm in the warming
cold LA today
is Friday, again.
The no geography
here shifts—
ocean ridges w pressure
sounds like foghorns.
Sonia sez Alma
Alma sez no
I’m Alma, again.
Alma opens Capital
& Spectacle in a New
Age of War, begins:
the fairy princess,
the fairy princess.
All the advice sez
do not blink, staring
at afterimages.
So this book.
Sonia gathers groups
for the puppet show—
Dolphin & the Caterpillar
bright in time.
Sonia sez there
are sixty seconds
in a minute—
so if I count
to sixty slowly…
Her new pants are
seaqouise, a color
we nearly know.
It is a pre-HD
sky today, almost
pixelated. Alma
is an adverb,
modifying.
Today the bright hurts:
what canvas sky there
was suspends, iterations
of distance tessellate
until morning. Let
me check the book stacks
in my brain, sez Sonia.
Tomorrow is the first
or isn’t. Alma, eyes
skying, croaks
her froggy wants.
Somewhere out there
dying congeals
from spectacle to flesh.
It’s a breaking heart thing
she sd, sez Sonia.
The grip of day is such.
Time reeds out
to the muddy fringe of sky,
all these erasures
like a darkness.
What empty surrounds
what I don’t hear here—
Alma breaking stories
into song.
In his first full-length collection, Daughters of Your Century (Furniture Press 2014), Dan Thomas-Glass wrote “a book about the war dead and the newly and dearly alive,” working to “reinvent the Dad poem,” as Chris Martin described it in a review in Rain Taxi. Continuing his exploration of the ethics of parenthood, Thomas-Glass’s second collection I Hope that Everyone in the World is Free takes its title from a poem written by his older daughter Sonia, who speaks and writes in the these poems alongside her sister Alma as much as alongside history itself. This selection comes from the central movement of the book, titled “SEZ.”
