Gnomes
Will Vincent

---

The fence poles rocket skyward as they breach
awakened, their clay skin falling in shards, they run the garden paths. 

A horde—a teeming sea of reaching pudgy fingers, punch forth baby
foot and fist. From shattered frozen dew, they ride bareback on wild mutts, dogs mottled 

with ragtag family trees, or saddled roosters to peck upon where concrete kisses sky.
By way of the ‘burbs of the ‘burbs scrambling, guinea pig-bodied, 

their overgrown toenails clatter
the escalators and super-buffed sky bridges of Neverland Mall.

With makeshift shivs, whittled sticks, sharpened tooth brushes, rag banners—
dough hands clutching ceramic shards, they ride.

The sky darkens with faeries, abuzz, worsening, their wing noise whites out
the highway’s engine song. 

This must be a joke.
The gnomes filch the White House garden. Mud-bloodied, 

they dance in strawberry caps, drunk on gushing apricot and nectarine.
They cough up seeds to resow the rows,

but a fallow angle motivates their needs. Will you be their final girl?
Beards, breeze-blown—eyes bulging from little nests of skin,

they sweat under vests sap-stuck with tree bark and mantles of Spanish moss.
In their napkin capes is their own allegory embroidered in mint green floss, 

glinting under street-lamps and obscured of its lesson.
Soaked in sprinkler light, gnashing horse teeth, they dig heel to hair and wing.

The skunks pull the ballistas restructured from tomato trellises propel
tiny watering cans of gasoline to see what else might burn.

They ride with a meadow of field mice awakened,
raccoons, possums, badgers, and beavers oceaned over roads, 

twitchy and trash-fed—rabid and perfect.