“Monsoon Summer from the Loneliest Road” by Kathleen Frank

By Miriam Akervall

I wanted to forest,

to stick my dogs into death

for personal heat,

but trees are also bodies.

I couldn’t stand their bleached joints

saluting from the duff.

Paved over, reticent.

Bending toward a Steer’s Head,

I feel as many here

as below Babyn Yar’s skeleton suburb,

bodies staked by soccer cleats

and television towers.

My own great mirrors are driven

with holes.

Memory is a raking chain

of small sharp teeth

and mouthy gullets. Chapped,

neck wrapped. I wanted to cut

with the Great American Tooth.

The first tree I felled was already dead,

charcoal snag sticking up

like a wick in black wax.

The last took hours,

I sighted, chopped,

it sailed down entrails

of brush. The sound came after

the ground shook.

Miriam Akervall is a Swedish American first year MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Idaho. Their work has appeared in Volume Poetry, Stone Journal, Voicemail Poems and elsewhere. They live in Moscow, Idaho.