Factory

Bruce Snider

This pill is a white bird in your cortex.

This pill pleads: no, no no

This is the pill that Alice took.

A burning wick in the mouth, a white-hot coal.

This pill tastes like tomorrow.

This pill like cool rain on your mother’s face.

This pill makes you happy.

This pill: blue.

This pill is a snake in the rafters.

It opens a window to the stars in your skull.

This pill is a soft one.

This pill’s gone hard.

This pill knows anything can be swallowed

when the bright pill-of-the-moon lights the yard.

This pill is a room within a room.

Another locked closet.

Steps to the lake where the boy was found drowned.

This pill is your always.

This pill depends.

This pill is a drill in your pocket.

A horse-kick, a full-bodied wine.

This pill says: wakey-wakey

This pill: be mine

Bruce Snider is the author of three poetry collections — Fruit, The Year We Studied Women, and Paradise, Indiana. He is co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice and is currently Chair of the Department of English at the University of San Francisco.