God, your mouth is open. It is an opening

hole, a sincere drop in temperature.

Let me guess: You watched the stock market crumple

like foil, knowing it could be smoothed

with your massive fingernail. These prophetic dreams

always prove false, yet you keep insisting:

bricks will turn to blood, green paint to honey.

Even the underwhelming miracles, such as salt

settling into itself from ocean water,

regularly fail to occur. What happened was that I,

to her, stopped leaving. Now the silkworms

are wrapped tight in their own madness.

Will you hear their cries? Their demands lack teeth.

Their hold on you is an emptied leaf.

God, your eyes are closed, and though your breathing is even

this means nothing. Crops are as easily destroyed

by an apathetic rain as a broken dam.

Still your voice. No one is arguing

imagination is invalid. No one is arguing.

But I believe, with your help, enough will remain.

Your hands are the necessary pages. Let me explain

the myth of the dissident fire.

Andrew Kozma (TX)  is a doctoral candidate in poetry at the University of Houston and a non-fiction editor for Gulf Coast. A 2004 Pushcart Prize nominee, his poetry has appeared in Caketrain, Lilies and Cannonballs Review, Washington Square, Spoon River Poetry Review, and elsewhere.