All the way home on Tuesday
I listened to the news about coal,
how yes it would/no it wouldn’t
 
Put People Back to Work, Increase
Energy Independence, Kill the Planet. 
And Tuesday night, no lie, for the first time
 
I can remember, every car of the train
that passes in our valley was a coal car, 
every car mounded full of coal, 
 
as if somewhere across the Ohio River 
a horde had been seething on stand-by God 
knows how long, just waiting for pen-stroke
 
permission to fill up trains with mountaintops
and shove them north.  It happened that fast, 
the news and then the train, and it’s true:
 
I didn’t fully believe what I was seeing 
even as I saw it, and felt—still feel—
how someone must when a UFO 
 
flashes across the sky above their deck, or Bigfoot 
lumbers through their high beams as they drive 
a lonely township road, or some other thing 
 
some say has never been, shouldn’t ever be, 
suddenly is, and there’s no one to ask 
 
Did you see those lights? What’s that 
running into the woods?

Oma’s farm lay flat beside a glass-green river, 
30 miles from Toledo. She said it looked like home. 
And where was home? It was the summer 
that my parents needed time alone. Batschka, 
Oma said, and ran her palms across her face 
as if to smooth a map. At the center of the map, 
her eyes burned like specific villages.

By morning, they were light suffused through 
balsam needles. Oma said, I had two brothers,
little brothers. The army take them. Lose them. 
She sliced the warm brown bread with her specific 
slicing knife, blade set parallel to wooden handle 
like a violinist’s bow. She buttered slices with 
her rounded buttering knife. But for paprikash,

a chicken had to die. She caught the rooster 
that had chased and pecked me, bound his talons, 
hung him from a low branch in the dooryard, 
upside-down. Slit his throat—this with a knife 
I’d never seen. Some times are bad, she said. 
Her eyes went dark and far away. Neighbors bad. 
Russians bad. Then she turned 

and smiled at me, and wiped the killing knife 
across the daisies on her apron, and went inside 
to put it in its special place. It was the day my 
parents came to take me back. I watched the rooster 
spurt and drain. We ate him and drove home
In September, teacher said I had to use a real 
country for “My Family Tree.” Mom said 

Hungary. Dad said Yugoslavia, but by then
it wasn’t real, either, anymore. Teacher said 
Put Germany. It’s what she spoke. But I put 
Batschka. Blood-red Magic Marker. 
There are knives for slicing bread, for buttering, 
for slitting throats—each knife specific 
to its purpose. Anyway, you asked me 

how I choose my words.