Charles Hensler

Smart Phone

Your wood shavings curl
in the slanting sun where your hands
release the aged aroma of cedar behind
your lead paint door

outside you could drive for days

on the extracted breath of a long gone world
map chirping in a french accent to find the same
weary display of charm in a box on another
same road in another same town

the President speaks

his head large as the watermelons
you recall in some other summer - green eyes
blinking back the cool pink flesh while cameras
falling around the blue edge of earth record
the satellite’s last photon flare before
crossing the sun’s farthest reach

look it’s always eight minutes ago here

the jets draw down the blue sky
tight across the checkerboard land
the roads wind everywhere finding
every door

we swipe the same waves now

we all have the same story
in our hands.

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Charles Hensler lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.  He attended Western Washington University where he won the Leslie Hunt Memorial Prize for Poetry.  His work has appeared in Jeopardy Magazine.