Survey
by Kimberly Gibson-Tran
Are those smokestacks or trees filleting the blue? Their cattails lean into each other, greening. I’ve been told pollution is what makes the sunset beautiful, but, really, I think it’s a mood that makes you look up from the road or whatever it is you’re going through. One day there was a fire in our neighborhood. It started in a garage and smoked for days, left a maze of ash-inked waves on the roof. How fast I leap to the conclusion, how much faster I forget. For the last several days I’ve ditched poems for murder podcasts – the ones with solves. There aren’t as many of those episodes. I remember I’d rather die by a sheet of lava, a blur of bear, than by a man’s hand. But, I remind, nature isn’t a single story. It levels and levels in gritty strata, presses skeletons into oil. There – a drone’s hovering buzz. If it kept going up and up, it would map, beyond this blackened patch, all the little centipedes of cul-de-sacs.
