Saving Venice

We agree that this is what we would call the children's
  storybook we'd write about rising waters
and how to save Venice & Murano from drowning.

You would illustrate the city floating like a barge of
  saltine crackers.
If the city were a pie, each small street would be sliced
  to share with the neighbors—
  Sicely, Portugal, Egypt.

Pieces of glass and frescos would adhere to a new place
and the history of Venice would separate and multiply elsewhere, cells in love, fattening,

a large busted woman swimming thru the waters,
floating in a preserve of churches and gondolas.

The book would be interactive at the end, in which,
the child could Velcro what part of Venice goes to Spain

or gets stuck arbitrarily to Ireland,
  a loose canon shot without aim
(or maybe there is a slice that doesn't make it very far at all).

The factory glue in this particular book
didn't let it part without ripping off some of the color

and so this street is thin & grainy, dark with the botch
  of fingerprints & cardboard
like the rising tides taking over plazas and staircases
  every day.

Little by little
fewer fruit stands

little by little, less music,
fewer pigeons eating fewer bits of seeds,

little by little
less tourists, less students,
less people in general reading books like these

until the only streets left are the thin ones

which are not even a part of Venice anymore,
just the arch of a bridge for a no more road
and only a story of where it used to go

to the lagoon or the opera house
as we decide its fate one night in bed

in each other's arms
while the soft world is humming
the sky gently raining.

1st Place Poetry Prize Shorleline Arts Council Poetry Month Celebration