(a Kerouac-ian remix)

We climbed to the top of a mountain.
I carried a lantern and a jazz singer
as a guide.

I felt the calamity of dust,
heard the atomic pulse of the womb.
You had that lousy feeling of not being high
so we poisoned the pear tree
and watched it die like the scorpion.

The next morning,
we got up, got laid,
then died like the fruit.
And it was perfect.

Rosemarie Dombrowski is the founder of rinky dink press, the co-founder/host of the Phoenix Poetry Series, and an editor at Four Chambers. Her collections include The Book of Emergencies, which was the 2016 Human Relations Indie Book Award recipient (Personal Challenge category) and The Philosophy of Unclean Things. She teaches courses on radical poetics and creative ethnography at Arizona State’s Downtown campus. Additionally, she is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Phoenix, AZ.