before

the still smoking valley and ash heap sang about the time before last tuesday // before the last 
rain // before the dirt filled mouth // before your hand in my hand // before the cracked and 
crazed riverbed cradling its stinking suffocating children // before the night engine turning bodies 
on the broken bone china dance floor // 

before face masks and oxygen tanks and hazmat suits and armed guard towers and cheerful 
assisted suicides and the random checks and searches and surveillance and our acceptance of 
these things as if we never knew any different as if it had always been this way and believing it 
when we were told it has always been this way // before we should have known better // before the 
fires lit up the shores at night // before the dead were trucked to the shores at night //

before the shadows lost their identity // before faith healing // before the sweat and semen stained sheets of our fathers were used to hang us // before i got depressed // before we forgot how to 
read // before the rocks and stones spoke and everything they said was true and terrified us // 
before my feet were planted in the black earth and my roots grew down and my flesh turned to 
bark and my jaw snapped and a great oak sprouted from my belly and an old man came and took 
an axe to my guts and the shit and stew spilled out and i had nowhere to hide my shame and that 
poison ate away at my base and roots and i rotted away and the old man set fire to the spot where 
i was planted and in the ashes he found her heart that i had swallowed and now her heart is kept 
in a shrine on the isle of dogs // before the dead woke to the sound of their own hearts beating //

before the wall or the veil or the divide // before the birds stopped prophesying // before i felt the 
need to write this // before the machine // before we bowed to the machine // before we fed it our
daughters // before it fed us our sons // before the sun never set and no new thing grew and no 
man could eat and soon all were dead and all was dust and there followed a long period of 
silence and the earth’s mourning and exhausted the sun finally set and in the cool of night the 
earth could rest and opened its mouth and out poured water and out poured life in the form of 
some green thing and that green thing begat another green thing and that green thing begat all 
manner of green things and soon the wasted and abused earth was green of land and blue of 
ocean but this has not happened yet and we do not know when it will happen but first we must 
die //

TIMOTHY FOX

Timothy Fox is originally from Texas. He has received a Houston Press Theatre Award for his play The Whale; or, Moby-Dick and a Vault Festival Spirit Award for his play The Witch’s Mark. His poetry has appeared in Rumble Fish Quarterly and Levee Magazine. He lives in London.