/ Third Place, 2024 Plentitudes Prize in Poetry /
My husband stands in army
fatigues and ballet flats,
wading through refuse.
I piss on a bar stool as if
to claim it. What was
given was also lost
in the flood, an excavation
that belongs equally
to burial. Now our levee
is this: an infestation
of fleas, cellar spiders
in the highest rafter,
the thunder mug, the money
spent on booze, the sound
but not meaning
of the word nunnery,
my ritualized discomfort.
It is my own eyes
that lie green with digging.
High in the mountains,
my husband built a homestead
and soured the lake
with geese. After the flood,
ghosts reigned the shiplap
siding, rearranged atoms
in the wood. What do we leave
and what do we take
to the train that is leaving,
any minute now, from
the station. I can imagine
going further north
with my perfectly-shaped
hat as the tamaracks
flicker on their blight.
Time is a doorless
phenomenon; like dust,
it can mean anything. Thus
the landscape blurs in motion
when my mind marks it still.