ADAM GIANFORCARO
Every Living Day
To give up convenience, to wear patience like walls
draped in soot. To do no harm.
I try my best. But the little I do always seems so little.
Map out the landfills. Bury yourself in plastic.
Every novelty cup filled to the brim with unbearable, living pain.
O Sorrowful Earth, this is sorrow overflowing.
The streets are flooded with it. Fish swim right up to our doorsteps.
The scary kind, too, with headlamps
and daggers for teeth.
When I can no longer kneel, I will wade myself
toward repentance, beg forgiveness—
for folding fruit waste in tin foil, for drinking coffee from a Keurig.
Every living day I fuck the earth with negligence.
Earlier this summer, I ran over a mouse with the lawnmower.
Sliced it in half like the ocean divorcing the sky.
And the mouse was a newborn,
with mama mouse giving birth to her second pup right there
in that verdant patch of trauma.
And as it happened, while the mouse twitched itself into stillness,
I thought immediately of this silly song from summer camp:
It’s cheese, cheese, cheese that makes the mice go ’round.
We squeaked our campfire voices and waved our arms like ribbons.
The last verse of the song goes like this, and we would scream it
as loud as we could: IT’S LOVE, LOVE,
LOVE THAT MAKES THE WORLD GO ’ROUND!
What is love if not sharp and spinning and smelling of earth?
The truth is harder to swallow. And the truth is this: I am a terrible partner.
I tell the Earth I’m sorry, write halfhearted elegies for field mice
only to fall victim to fast fashion and Amazon Prime.
What I mean is this: I try my best when it is convenient to do so.
And now I’ll zoom out, place the blame elsewhere,
create alternative histories to make myself seem less culpable.
Privilege is the planet from which all of this is possible.
Convenience is a world on fire.
And to give up that convenience, to do no harm.
I’ll pretend to not know the answer when I ask, But how?
Adam Gianforcaro is a writer living in Wilmington, Delaware. His poems can be found in Palette Poetry, RHINO, Okay Donkey, Poet Lore, The Cincinnati Review miCRo series, and elsewhere. He was an Honorable Mention in The Maine Review’s 2021 Embody Awards and a winner of Button Poetry’s 2018 Short Form Contest.