Attaching the Rainfly
by John Bonanni

We take to streets to live in them.
From just behind the nylon of this cave,
the long-standing edifice belches: Your hunger is your own.

I unzip the nylon in swooshes, I disagree,
I nail it all down to the concrete.
The edifice grows red with plastic.

And the plastic sends out more plastic.
I inhale the exhaust and curl my toes,
the air thickens with a warm sense of shattering coffee mugs.

To escape it, I go with them, I take the low bridge,
the one that everyone takes,
and we collapse it

with sound—
the murmur of our mad treason,
the restless call of our shoe soles,

the rip of the nylon across November,
the never-ending clap.
We chanted away the rumbling terror of cloud,

And we stayed
to cross this ocean pavement, to roar like unbridled rockets,
a push, a give, a raised baton. To all the cameras in our pockets.

Attaching the Rainfly – John Bonanni

John Bonanni’s work has appeared in Off the Coast, Whaling City Review, and Ganymede, among others. He is founder and editor of the Cape Cod Poetry Review, a regional literary journal and reading series which showcases the work of Cape Cod poets. He is the recipient of a scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and a grant for the arts from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Commonwealth College. His most recent visual art has appeared at a juried exhibition at the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Cotuit, MA, and his poetry is forthcoming in Mutual Muses: A Marriage of Poetry and Visual Art at the Cultural Center in South Yarmouth, MA. He was recently interviewed at the Occupy Boston encampment for an article in the Boston Globe.