Alison Luterman
Vocation
She asked what is your calling and I said I'm an earthworm.
I eat traffic noise, overheard conversation, birdsong,
sadness, elation, revelation, celebrity gossip,
then poop out poems. I burrow through lush gardens
of the rich and survival plots of the poor
chewing everything in my path, making tunnels
of breathing space between event and its calcification
into history. I hide out under the sneaker-soles
of the kid in baggy basketball shorts
kicking an empty take-out box up the hill by the projects,
whose head is down, who will not meet anyone's eyes.
I eat his confusion and unanchored longing
which are the same as my own, and I mix it
with the color of the sky today, blue gray with a bank of clouds
and I add some soft bits of my own insides,
and I make this little word-thing for him, maybe someday
he'll read it, somewhere down the road