Alchemy Practicum and Goat Visit
Goat, you were the only one among the three goats who pressed his head against the fence when Rachel and I came to you after picking crab apples and black walnuts. I returned to the paradise of childhood labors...
“at the mercy of the geography”
Goat, you were the only one among the three goats who pressed his head against the fence when Rachel and I came to you after picking crab apples and black walnuts. I returned to the paradise of childhood labors...
We step over fading caution tape, a Geiger counter in your hand ticking the steady tick of background radiation. Up and down the textured metal stairs...
But you burn, and I know it.
Adrienne Rich, “Orion”
As we wind up the Berkley hills, brown foam
peels off the dash of his hot Dodge Dart.
I crank down the windows for a sun-singed draft…
When Xerxes wrote again: “Deliver up your arms,” Leonidas wrote back: “Come and take them.”
Black eye. The left one. Stubble. Leather jacket and underneath
a black t-shirt with “Fuck You” printed in white. Buckled boots.
The T runs down the heart of the bridge. The cars shake in the dim light left by the dregs of the day...
Bagno. The name means bog. The village may have been a bog before the drainage ditches gridded it into kolkhoz...
He turns into the comforter of rain, no umbrella or hat, just the quilted sidewalk. The spume from wheels passing...
[Content warning: animal death]
From the half-finished bunker of the concrete basement That was to be the foundation of our now-abandoned Familial abode that I will neither finish nor furnish...
The tall, even pines with sand at their feet brood black between their trunks...
The hard blue sky behind her run through with a single white thread of a contrail...