Matt Sadler
	New Year’s Pig      My joy is a sidewalk on the last small town parade with the burning reds of changing Maples   and the brassy dopplar of a far off band   and the Shriners in their Devo hats and zippy little cars.  If my world is tilted, this street   is its axis.  I didn’t come here for answers,   only to hear a chorus of sealed lips humming Louie Louie! and The Final Countdown and The Heat is On.  I didn’t come here   to feel joy so much as to give myself   away.  Sitting in my sagging Adirondack under the blooming hub of a wire pole, I see   a solitary ant carrying the nachoed orange tip of a Dorito to its own celebration.   If I close my eyes now I know I’ll miss out on the next Miss Golden Rose but   there are so many other things I can see.   First, I’m in Coleraine next to the giant grasses on the road to Portsrush.  Or I’m inside   the dark and seedy VFW on Pine, stuffing   hard boiled eggs one after another into my parched gullet.  Or I’m in Detroit again,   on a different street, another axis, walking a route I’d mastered through a summer of boredom.   After I imagine death as a symphony of leaves scraping the road, I pass four hulking steam vents topped by massive steel grey nipples and   beyond them I see two kids, you know they are beautiful, throwing a ball through a milk crate,   the same ancient game forever.  They taunt me   from their stoop, the sunlight smashes me off their smiling teeth.  One great man said   love your fate and ended in tears, apologizing to a horse.  Can you see his ghost hovering above the towns and fields and city streets?   Does he see me here, smiling back at the perfect faces, forgiving my trespassers,   the unmistakable murmur of leaves in the stiff wind, the sharp angles of architecture   breaking the soft curve of the horizon.   Those leaves are the people humming around me, and if I open my eyes now I’ll see   dancing, even the most threadbare of toughs   bobbing their heads at least, even the pig marching down the avenue toward its final canvas tent, leashed by a heavy rope   to its captors, sticks its snout into the air like us, curious, building itself into a moment,   loving every moment of the moment and somehow stalling the future, slowing down   time, overcoming its fate.   The Blue Glow of The warm electric hum of tubes heating inside the box is gone, flattened by scientists, and the blue glow of last years hydrangeas, gone, hijacked to purple by some dissident acid. The bombed out church in Berlin, the shape still stands, a reminder, but the anguish I used to feel is gone, obliterated by the wrecking ball of new wife, new child; therefore the drinking buddies gone, the cigarettes, well, one burns still under the moons watchful eye, real and hot in my lungs. I throw it into the street, into the past, I tell myself, sneaking back in quickly and quietly when I’m done.