R.T. Castleberry

Just a Shout Away

Death is in the air, is on our tongues and ashen lips.
It ranges in timbre – high and dark and stern:
voices of church chimes, EMS sirens,
the carjacker bellowing into an open window.
It modulates to riot, evacuation, insurgency,
embraces the Bloomsbury wit, the burn victim.
It lays beneath the map of a storming moon,
the uncertainties of surges, percentages, landfall.
It’s caustic and commemorative, celebratory
as the final breath of the chronically ill.
Death is on our lips, ashen, corrosive,
caked in the corners of our mouths like meat, like 
    mud.

____

R.T. Castleberry is a widely published poet living in Houston, Texas.