The white boy in blue jeans jumping
on the trampoline becomes
his mother in the kitchen opening
a wood grain cabinet. Every father 
is someone's son, just as 
the coffee poured into the mug
leaves sediment at the bottom 
before being refilled. Now
the doctor (I mean father)
is walking out the door,
his son seated at the table.
One to his office, the other to his school.
Somewhere all their schedules
are marked down in red ink
(the FBI? the angels?).
In a classroom the boy holds
a kaleidoscope for the first time,
the room fractured as if through
the eye of an insect.
The children's lines of movement
are flight on the ground.
The floor is just another reason
to jump. Somewhere else,
the freeways are lifting
white people like so many ants.
The sky above is a network
of smaller skies.
When does the boy learn 
he too is part of a machine?
The assembly lines have changed 
from building bombs to trampolines.

After Bonobo’s “Cirrus.”

//Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a PhD Candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, where he is also a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster. His chapbook Stopgap won The Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest and was published in 2019.