If Anyone Asks by Dean Young

"Maybe the unknown still loves me. Maybe it wants me dead."

If Anyone Asks

by Dean Young

tell them just because they can’t hear the moon 
doesn’t mean it’s not screaming.
Tell them it’s just like being attacked
by a murderous lunatic in your own bathroom mirror or by 
your own jewelry or toothbrush or taco
or panthers, entirely in-the-mind panthers.
It’s like being handed a key
and it drops right through your open palm. Every 
30 seconds another wing goes missing. Every 10 
a breathing machine’s turned off.
Anyone who’s tried to write a poem gets exposed to 
some mighty whichway winds.
Everything is made of jumps. 
The sentence is always Life,
crepuscular hatchling fallen into the hand 
like one of your own organs,
weird stuff coming in the mail,
creepy bouncy eyeball, Neptunian quartz, once a 
broken cobwebby crypt-smelling music box from 
the unknown.
Maybe the unknown still loves me. Maybe 
it wants me dead.
A horse comes halfway out. 
The ballerina has no legs. 
Most of what we’re made of 
comes from outer space and 
wants to get back there.
A banana is a berry, a loofah
a gourd, the strongest glue on earth
is made by a whelk. Just try to introvert the 
ambulance. Try to get some nerve. Spiders, 
scientists tell us, could eat
the entire human race in less than a week, should 
they ever get in the mood.
Yellow mood of Van Gogh’s poison. 
Numbered mood of a tax return.
Here, I made a list. A neon larva
twists itself into a pupa from a single silken mood.
The soul is fletched. The soul is dashed 
across the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Is 
reality just a failure of the imagination? 
That’s not what the dandelion thinks 
breaking through the asphalt. Not what the 
sprinkles on your cupcake signal.
Sometimes pressure creates electricity but 
we always risk dust
in the confetti factory of the ant farm of consciousness.
People always try to turn me off
whenever I mention the Ant Farm of Consciousness, 
capitalized or not, but if my mother
couldn’t find that switch, good luck. Ecstasy 
is willingness.
I dare you to find a river any other way. I 
dare you to breathe.
Some cries never reach us even 
though they’re our own. The 
best endings are abrupt.

from Creature Feature (Copper Canyon, 2026).