EVERY MOUNTAIN ON MARS OUTDOES EVEREST

Ian Cappelli

The corner kids hawking ersatz

     pucks crush beer-cans with their shoes.

     I’m sure they know by now how small

gravity’s scrunched them: into gossip, 

     Wal-Mart cashiers. Children sequestered

to the ISS will grow longer bones, extend

their limbs into spendthrift trusts, into 

     basecamps between stars if they wanted.

     Some mountaintops have hands.

My spaghettified soot, post-Greyhound,

became Goodwill clothes – Gramma says

     (in other news) to let the words shoot

     from your mouth until, in space, their kids

           are the size of football fields. I am proof

                that she lies.

                                      Typically, sediment pigpiles

     over itself until indistinguishable 

from slagheaps,

from karst.