2018 Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Prize in Poetry

 

after Derrick Austin

 

 

A small mare,

savaged in a field, its neck

 

coiled in barbed wire and reddened froth.

                 Bent lumber and limbs

 

of trees conquer the grassland,

strewn and disjointed like wartime dead.

                 I am no medic.

 

My heartbeat sends the vulture away. Circling, circling

the ruin, deciding where to land.

 

Boone County sifts through its rubble:

                 whole neighborhoods

 

turned inside out, colored brown

in wet dirt by a pillar of wind.

                 I lose track

 

of direction, don’t know which way is home.

A humid quiet hovers above the wasted ground.

                 The now-homeless rummage for scraps—a tea set,

 

a trusted guitar. Shock pulling them out of themselves,

                 until they too become debris.

 

They are remembering cows

where there are now

                 innards,

 

the sky before it broke

                 into a spear,

 

the old lab barking

where there used to be a door.

 

The vulture perches on a slab of wood, ignoring what still lives

                 in search of the freshly slain.

 

What am I to it

                                        but a few unlucky breaks away

from being a meal?