Cheese was invented as a way to carry
& store milk through the winters when
the cows the goats hunkered in straw
& didn’t want to be bothered standing
while you prodded & pulled & sought
new even unpasteurized ways to carry
your kids from one day to the next.
Libraries were invented as a way to
carry & store memories. Snapshots
of celebrations as memories as ways
to carry & protect against some future
grief, because honestly, when’s the last
time you went through that old shoebox
of old photographs that might be the first
thing you grab if/when the house catches
fire? Or sometimes grief as a pathway
to memory. I don’t make the rules.
A colossus is any statue larger-than-
life-sized & is used to carry in its marble
the morality of one culture into the next
culture & hopefully into the next until
it all goes the way of Ozymandias,
for if you raise the temperature high
enough you can transform almost any
solid back into liquid, higher still, gas—
gas the reason the sky turns red while
the sun goes down. Pollutants, like
most side effects to a good idea, can
still make one thing a little better,
a little stronger than when it was born,
& I’m talking about more than just
building immunity. But climate change,
like emotional investment, in its current
form, doesn’t lend to fitting neatly
into your backpack. As in, here, I only
have this emotion in liquid form &
I need you to DoorDash it across town
so maybe just try pouring it into your
pockets & maybe then if you cycle fast
enough, you’ll get there before you’re
completely empty. What does each
of us carry that no one really knows
about? This skin a carrier for these
organs, this heart for this blood, bones
for marrow, marrow for what some might
call a soul, but I call charm, I call duende,
empowering & impishly mystical, I call
a carrier for magnetism, a carrier for
electricity & identity. When most things
act most like their nature & not like
something in some other state is
when I come to most things love.