As I check for the chance of rain
my eyeballs catch an attractive actress 
who suffers from my very own pain. 

Clickbait cleavage, viral tweets, 
this pathway leads to idleness:  
top ten tunes, top thousand beats. 

I feel like a possum in a way, 
who catches wind of an apple core 
inside a box on a wire tray, 
screened in, with a little door,

this box that is absorbing me: 
phone, person, possum, trinity. 

Ralph Earle lives near Raleigh, North Carolina, where he designs websites for poets and other creative people. He holds a Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill, where he taught poetry before working in the high-tech industry. His collection The Way the Rain Works won the 2015 Sable Books Chapbook Award. Recent poems have appeared in Indelible, Tar River Poetry, Triggerfish Critical Review, and Sufi Journal.