Realism by Beth Bachmann

Realism

God said, your name is mud

and the thing about mud is you

got to throw it down

repeatedly

to remove the air

and sometimes cut it

and rejoin it with another part.

If stars are made of dust,

it’s not the same stuff,

God said;

you can’t make a hut out of it,

only heaven,

and when I said dust to dust, that’s not what I meant.