​Our Children’s Viewing Room
 

Switzerland banned lobsters from being boiled alive
the same day she finally followed through, and signed
the papers. But I still wondered how the Swiss
replaced one murder for another, or if they now gave
the lobster’s family forewarning, or at least
a viewing room. Can an old love, disrupted by
taste buds, learn new tricks? I don’t know.
This isn’t about love. This is about lobsters,
how they shriek in the boiling water as if
already understanding the feeling of being eaten.
 

 
Sastrugi In Early September
 

In the summer underlain
the evergreens sung with birds
even if the boots we wore
signaled our time was short.
At least I thought it was.
Later, grayer, I’ll say
we should’ve had a third.
But now all that mattered
was keeping the kids warm,
by hike or at ballgames
flaked in white, to where
we’d out-weathered
climate change so as to
adapt to what we really are.
Husband and wife,
or father and mother.
Whatever makes snow
in the summer fun, and
keeps summer summer,
even as buntings freeze
and drop from the trees.
 
 

 
Paradoxical Undressing
 

What I can’t understand is why she wants to stop shredding
Steamboat’s gold-dusted slopes. With gleaming chairlifts,
with history, the rickety spirit of Howelsen Hill rises inside
and resonates like the cover of this bodega manuscript.
You wouldn’t think they’d sell these on the mountain
or the time it takes to finish — mostly speed reading:
glancing at the range while ripping down some moguls.
Like a ski mask, yet icy diction still full-bodied in my beard.
Although it was heartfelt, the plot lacked mass appeal.
Where are we going, wrote Stephen Dunn, as if
it’s not an issue of here or there. How our jackets
disappeared like snow. How in the end all we knew
was how to find a small spot to go, and squeeze into.
 
 

 
Incompatibility
 

She can’t wink
and I can’t whistle.
 
She snaps her fingers
and I shake my head.
 
For all sharpness said
it never compares
 
to that left unsaid,
the silent drives
 
and nights spent with
a river between us.
 
Embankments eroding.
Mercury poisoning
 
wiping out the fish
of dreams. She facing
 
east, still unable
to see the sunrise.
 
 

 
Impending Divorce
 
​
In a precisely lighted kitchen,
I hear my wife in code:
Says the spokes are broken.
Says please contribute, not robotically.
 
It’s that time of night:
We’re listening for de-icing trucks.
If salt noise were a traceable scent,
it’d go on for miles, 
 
but the bypass won’t reopen anytime soon.
Its frontage roads have snow and trash
stacked even higher. I’ve reported
on a few trend stories in my time, and
the words of this particular enterprise
are so desperate they misspell themselves
in an effort to miss print. It’s against
my ethics to reveal my sources,
 
even in an effort to reverse this course.
Too many corn grains have been fermented.
Two, off balance. Two whiskeys
for fiction, or the arsenic for truth.​