by Steven Croft
Let us go madcap into the outside air physicians tint
with rolling globes like schools of fish that find the darkness
of our lungs, lodge and sting there, a cyanide of suffocation.
Let us go out, walk past every microbe merciless and seeking
like a crow's flat eye
To the Exchange Club Fairgrounds where the Dixieland
Carnival has parked in silent rows gathering the field's dust
for the last two months, unpack its trucks, let the carnies
fire up the Ferris wheel and merry-go-round, share our
cotton candy, hear the cries
Of the game booths' winners and losers, fun with probability
where stakes are low, but as night wears we'll remember
the risk we've taken, repack the carnival, carry a day's memory
of joy between our hands to the solitary wards of our homes,
our national hospital we fled briefly and against all advice.
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He has recent poems in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.