Late September means
the chickens—
in summer imperturbable—
scatter at the shack’s wall.
They sense a flesh confined
trucks moving away,
the ends of all things
hot and strange.
This evening the wind
has shifted; the vines
have browned, fall against
the boy’s summer plan:
a pyramid, a monument
to which he did not pray.
Mother tries the door.
The cat has perched atop
the Hyundai top,
a kind of porch,
and symbols here have pushed
away to need—tin foil
makes a drape, branches
of fig to fence the strays.
When the rains come,
the girl, barely old enough
to lie, will gather armfuls
of rocks, wishing they were clouds.
Carl Boon lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at 9 Eylül University. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Burnt Pine, Two Peach, Lunch Ticket, and Poetry Quarterly. He is also a 2016 Pushcart Prize nominee.
Foxglove Journal 