by Christopher Lisee ’10

Death by newsprint—
the business section eclipsed the table lamp’s mirthless glow as Citgo’s Venezuela
Trouble hit hard an unintended audience.

Perhaps he was meditating on death
or fashioning tiny mayfly prayer flags
from stray banana peel fibers,
which he’d dole out to other Buddhist mayflies

to place wherever Buddhist mayflies’ prayers need saying.
I’d like to think the life I took
just might have had a prayer
because Buddhist flies get another chance.

I would have sent an incarnation onward as an inadvertent station
on Nirvana Railways, giving it a second or third
hundredth shot at bodhi, which for Buddhist mayflies
is realized simply one day at time.