I wake before dawn with murder on my mind.
The city doesn’t love me. Or I don’t love it.
The slope of the earth isn’t quite right.
I grind it in my teeth the grit of mulch and fern.
The instant replay button sticks and I miss
my last homicidal mission while the morning hours
slip their fingers into my breakfast cereal.
I need to prepare lessons to be a better citizen.
Was I under the impression
that the afterlife is better?
Then I’m in the car sobbing because cars are places too.
They have all the right knobs and vents and
the radio tells me in no uncertain lyrics
I will never find love again.
What if your heart stops being my chauffeur?
How will I learn to doppelganger simple tasks?
In the produce section so many rounds and reds and
ruffled things and when requirement does not arrive
it becomes a phantom limb. Just stick to the list.
Towering aisles of sugared cereals
have no wishes or viscera but
there are mazes on the back that ask can you help
a rabbit to escape? Though it escaped so long ago
into a blaring florescence.
And where does light arrive when the eyes
are dolor makers? It’s necessary
to strategize. Consider
fact-making estuaries. The blown-glass
of sadness. The daily accretion of shirt
sleeves. Every task is inconvenient unsmiling
plastic. This gum is not enough. This song
is not enough. This place was made for someone
happier than me.

Jennifer Metsker is the author of the poetry collection Hypergraphia and Other Failed Attempts at Paradise published by New Issues Press. Her poetry has most recently appeared in The Shore, The Dialogist, and After the Pause. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she is the Writing Coordinator at the Stamps School of Art and Design.

José Rojas (he/they) is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist and creative director based in Berlin. For the past ten years he has worked at the intersection of art, design, photography, video, animation, music and education. His visual work is a surreal vision of numerous fantasies, oscillating between the vanilla and the grotesque. As a storyteller -and queer person- he advocates the urgency of reinventing narratives, told in a framework of new values that intercept pop culture and social media. Inspiring audiences to unlearn recurring outdated and dangerous patterns.