We wobble,
fall, 		   snap:
We 
	   tremble.

A distracted driver runs a red light—
a friend, T-boned; a mother at the grocer’s 
parking lot gets jumped while her children scream; 
that love dog whose eyes saved you amid a dark 
night of the soul is riddled with leukemia. 

So many in need, 
like the atlas of Earth’s 
eight billion humans on tilt 
tussling on the field 
of a cosmic pinball game. 

We hit the flippers, 
carom off bumpers, 
drop into underground lanes 
only to kick out, 
light up the scoreboard. 

We aim to win, to chalk up 
a free game, but the machine 
needs another quarter, GoFundMe 
another dollar, the parking meter 
of life to be fed again and again. 

Each day, from the same air, 
we draw about 22,000 breaths; 
from fresh water we all refresh; 
from spirit divine inspiration. 
With our eyes in focus, 

we might open our cloak of protection, 
like our lives depend on it, like the divine 
is a mirror of us lending redemption beyond 
our own body or borders, though the wheel 
is spinning and the world on tilt. 

Marcus Elman

is a yoga and fitness therapist working mostly with the elder-sage population in Southern California. He is curious about energy, how things work and get repaired, and the idea of redemption. His poem “The Boulevards of Los Angeles” received an honorable mention in Beyond Baroque’s 2017 annual poetry prize and was published in the textbook Method & Mystery: A Research-Based Guide to Teaching Poetry (The Poetry Salon, 2019). “The Crossing” was shortlisted for the Into The Void Poetry Prize 2020. His poems have been published in Cultural Daily [see links below], and in three volumes of Sunbeams: The Joan Ramseyer Memorial Poetry Anthology (2018, 2019, and 2020). He is a graduate of American River College, UC Davis, and Pepperdine.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Marcus Elman: Two Poems in Cultural Daily (5 January 2023): “The Prosciutto Ambulance” and “The Offering”

⚡ The Boulevards of Los Angeles in Cultural Daily (26 September 2018)