from HOME GUARD
We were only waiting for that last animal to buck up
crack-hoofed and acrid against our makeshift bayonets.
Trains traced and exacting. It’s ours first; second, nature’s.
Slabs of packed clay, drawn raw with rain. One boy locks
another in the cellar for a night. After, how his hands
were wrong-colored. Blue-black. There are kinds of cold
were are not used to. Which was how it felt. Like tin.
Like a strip of shingle scavenged from trailers two exits
from ours, scattered and shot through the woods
in last week’s storms. How we called each other
[ ], worse. Eye-level. The deer’s decay, smeared
by the tracks. We did what we did. And when god
turned her face from us, we slipped the metal
under our fingernails just to hear each other sound.
TYPO
30
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