By Laura Passin
I left home. I did not go back.
I didn’t drive a car
for 25 years, I took the train,
the bus, I walked
until my heels bled.
I taught Huck Finn to adults
and Adrienne Rich to children.
I dropped morphine
into my mother’s
starving mouth.
I marched against the war
and then the other war
and then the secret civil war.
I quit dieting.
I told men they were wrong.
I wore my mask.
Prayer is nothing.
I paid attention, but
to what, to what?
The city is still eroding,
the lake still eating the shore.
The trees are still burning,
animals shrieking inside.
My brother’s bones
still break and break.
Who made the world?
This world, I mean,
the one gone to seed in our hands.
Escaping / Air
rich men riding rockets
just to say they could
one billion lungs
keeping watch
dollars made garbage
dust to dust
a volcano unravels
punches the stratosphere
with ash
seen from space
something underneath us
does not want us
on its skin
every shore a tsunami
begging to be born
Water / Pollution
The octopus is not the ink:
the ink is the hole
where the octopus was.
*
Whole reefs of coral burn
acid-white, memorials
to their own bodies.
*
The stenciled fish
by the sewer grate where trash
runs straight to the river.
*
The Kodachrome sunsets over Lake Erie,
those motes of industrial waste
shimmering like the world ending.
*
My brother’s ashes swirling white by the shore,
blowing, blown. Water: dust:
dust.
Laura Passin is the author of Borrowing Your Body (Riot in Your Throat) and All Sex and No Story (Rabbit Catastrophe Press). Laura earned her PhD in English Literature at Northwestern and her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. Her writing has appeared in a wide range of publications, including Prairie Schooner, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Toast, Electric Literature, and Best New Poets. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net anthology. Laura lives in Denver with too many pets. http://www.laurapassin.com/