Adam Fell

Strewn

       Though just September,

they’ve put the pumpkins up for sale.

I set the picnic table with newspaper,

pull out the carving kits,

let the kids scoop out their pulpy hearts.

         This business of being containers

for guts or for candles,

for little birds that asphyxiate first,

leaves tender little to love in one’s chest,

tender little to remind us:

no one else sees our organ donor stickers,

                 no one else sees the farmer take our guts,

  so orange against his too-night-carried frame,

 back out to the field and replant them in rows.

Wyalusing,

                             our loss is at a founding.

From this ridge I can see Iowa falling into the river.

They’ve turned the runway lights on.

Down this road there are blackberries for sale,

people are buried in mounds near the dumping station.

Thylacine

Somewhere in this delta there is a tape of me

imagining myself less a handler, 

more a houseless yard matted beneath blankets.

When I leave, there is a brief pause;

the rain stops beneath the overpass.

What I mistake for silence is the sound

of everyone else shutting their windows at once.

Making Light Echoes

   My brother wades to me,            drunk, eyes treading

light echoes in the mist of the hot springs.

             He lends his eyes to cover the naked

                               girls,     their hard,   dark pits,                the chipped masonry

                                         molding this creek to three corrupted pools,  

                                                     each torn mouth mended warmer than the next.

 We watch the sublimation of the girls

                  into dark, drunken steam,                    the re-beading

             of their dim-pored bodies onto stairs,    snow

         pocking the coarse tile of their groutless backs.

                 Though hand-razed,     this water has mortared us,

                                   has lent our shared blood its transparency.

            I create small waves with my hands,     float

an empty beercan across the water between us.