No Sin Like Arson by Aimee A. Norton | Really System: Issue Two

No Sin Like Arson

Aimee A. Norton

There is no eiderdown to courage,
no husker du to truth.
Unlike falseness,
everywhere viral,
virtue stands alone in its icy prairie,
inaccessible except through
transformation, like a jersey,
unraveled, re-knit, turned inside out
and worn anew.

Lack of commitment
erodes foundations.
The jerks, only in it for a few years,
can't wait to corrode the new and fresh
with their battery-acid piss.
Men have new wives.
Women have new faces.
Chaplins have new faiths.
Molesters have new neighborhoods.
All the while the honeybees keep on
with tireless fructation.

There's no sin like arson
that burns the buildings to tender
tinder and razes all to ash.
Honesty doesn't please.
The captain no longer
goes down with the ship.
Instead the poor souls in steerage
pay the price.

Aimee A. Norton is a research astronomer and poet. She works at Stanford University researching the Sun's magnetic fields. She enjoys the parallel ways in which physics and poetry compress big, experiential truths into small spaces. Her chapbook titled Permissions was published in The Drunken Boat, Winter 2013.

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