poem

Cristina Newton Edison Pena Runs the Six Miles

There are places in the Atacama desert the rain has never been to.
The rain doesn’t know the inside of the puckered tunnels
of the collapsed mine where Edison Peña dreams
he's eating a fist of sand. The running scene features him
guzzling from the tap over the kitchen sink,
and his wife with washed hair reminding him there are glasses
and fondness; then a close up of himself
forever finishing that bedrock and rocksalt bite.
When he wakes up, he’s still a lump in the gut of a whale
that won’t cough up. A knot in the throat of a world
that swallows hard. His body is eating itself
half a mile down the driest place on earth.
Time stews slowly in the dumb tum of the mine.
Time has nowhere to go in a tumor of rock
on a spoonful of tinned fish and a sip of bad milk every other day,
and drills holes in a man that it fills with dross,
so Edison Peña gets up and runs up and down the doltish pit,
till he reckons he’s done the six miles
from the mouth of the mine to the mouth of his woman
waiting at the door. Then he stops with his face to the wall.