Poetry

The Plat Book

cast our farm
and neighbors’
farms as flat […]

We dug potatoes from their cabinets of soil, watched
the belly of the earth turn over in its grave, a glimpse of flesh
through darkening ground, roots and greenlings—then the plow.

The pang and clangor of pitch-dense wood
in the stove and the odd, almost syncopated
pops of studs, joists, and rafters as they warm […]

In the alluvium of
the hot afternoon,
where the day’s clarities […]

At the lower fence line under the stars
he hears what at first he takes
to be the neighbor’s mare come
to investigate his apple pocket […]

Ruin

was rumored

to be rooming

up the road
where

a neighbor’s barn’d
burned down.

The forecast had not predicted it,
and its beginning, a calming, rumbled dusk

and pleasant lightning, she welcomed as harbinger

With a squeal, the already
otherworldly broadcast
stuttered,
scattered,
leaving
only a tattered hiss.

In the patient, quiet museum, she is exhibited
closed, indehiscent inside a glass casket,

reclining on her back, on hair long as her spine.

In the morning we found
40 acres of oaks
torn to the ground.