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.