Inverted Weather

A car in front of you jumps out of the road like an orca and lands on its back

Kisses a spider’s web in the dried-out garden bed beside the train track

While every house with a dog nearby implodes at sunset

And dark creeps streets like dew-fueled Devil’s Ivy

How many kids are pissing right now on carpets beneath The Last of Us?

Can the succulents hear the hum of I See a Darkness as hair dye bleeds down a drain?

Roses unfurl, the suburbs glower, 747s intersect on runways

A back-lane stone curlew screaming—recreate it with the Red Panda particle pedal (rare)

If a pride of Fuzzfaces can’t emulate a wipeout then some tropical storm will

Strum a tsunami’s tongue, a shrewd transistor feeder licking its hummingbird brain

And crashing Wall St and its concrete palms into smithereens

Mashed calculator on the sidewalk, shadows of piggies flooding the market

With gulls criss-crossing reflections a lightning conductor pierces another stormfront

Fierce rain grenade on green shoots an extension of the object image

Objectively imagined, you see in night-green vision while raining shots of grenadine

Your drone technology reflecting gull markers on conductors under high-voltage

Flying pigs, whose mishmash of calcified shadows haunt Mardi Gras

Concrete lies, petrified in palmers pumping streets into weeping rubble

And brains, lick the tsunami back with their shrewd, resistant tongues humming

Their faces, a spiral arrangement thundering low and rich since the autumn of 1966

So you curl back into red bricks, pan the lane, make yourself as rare and particulate as a stone

You’re on another plane, in a satellite city, under a fashionable shower rose

Which sucks out the darkness from hair—drains hear the hum, succulents die

A dry spell, a slow script, a farfetched plot, a balding carpet, an inky undercurrent of despair

Devilled likenesses creep into view and night dew drips from the sky as from an IV

Sun collapses on houses of grave and immortal tension—dog-toothed nothings

As trains of spiders lie down in garden beds, kissing the webbed air goodnight

In unihemispheric sleep, one eye open for headline, jumpstart, carcass or psychopomp

_{Footnote: this poem was created using the Dietary Restrictions constraint, in which the two authors decided that each line must contain an animal or plant, a human-made object, a location, plus some kind of apocalyptic weather. It was partly inspired by the sestina ‘Crone Rhapsody’ by John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch, whose every line contains the name of a flower, a tree, a game, and a famous elderly lady, as well as the word ‘bathtub’, while all of the end-words are pieces of office furniture. As ‘Inverted Weather’ unfolded, it took on the shape of a double sonnet in which all 14 lines of the second half of the poem reflect on their counterpart lines from the first half in inverse order.}