Solarium

The pomegranates are blurs of rouge

in the sky's tarnished mirror.

The city, bleary with heat. Each day the eyes

of my cat assemble a more precocious gold.

We press our blackened flesh against a sky so bright. I hold

her in my arms at the fading windows.

We gaze together at nothing in particular,

down an avenue that leans so far her tawny eyes

gutter out. In my laboratory, immortal cancer cells

divide and divide. The pomegranates

are almost ripe. Some splintered open the way

all things fragment—into something fundamental.

Either everything's sublime or nothing is.

--Katherine Larson