Mark Dunbar
House fire
We wanted to scream
Go back to your mothers! Drop dead!
at the large men in oxygen
masks and helmets and the hoses
they dragged in, the tromping boots
and the seared black
of what I swear
was a kitchen,
but we’d called them,
unlike the neighbors we’d never
see again standing like a chorus
struck dumb on the grass—
neighbors I’d never ask
about the ravishments of glinting
axe heads and sirens fading
into the strange magnificat
of breaking glass.
I only stood back
minting what currency I could
from ruin
and found in its place
my father, who looked at me
in utter astonishment
and laughed.
~
Food train
My sister stood on the pier and said
that a turtle had bitten her—there, on the toe,
and she cried when I said that she was lucky
it hadn’t eaten her complete, that
all of the other animals would eat her too—
the fish and the snakes
and probably even our dog
because that’s how creatures behave.
It was natural and there was a name for it—
the food chain,
and she ran and cried some more
at what she’d heard
and said that she didn’t want
to be on that train,
and I ran too but too late shouting
but you’re the queen, the shining queen
of the train, but she was gone.
She jumped or fell and fingers pointed
and there were shouts as she flailed—
get her you on the pier,
but sun spray blinded me—it pinned me
to the moment as the day
hailed itself from far away
and someone else saved it.
No one likes to talk about
how that tumble became your calling,
how death caught your eye,
no one standing by, queen,
to keep you from stepping out
with that oaf.
The old pier has collapsed. The tide runs out.
Somewhere a train strips the night
to an echo, no figurehead blind
on its dirty snout
to fall into the waves.
Mark Dunbar lives in Brookfield, Il. His work has appeared in Red Rock Review, Spellbinder, Sky Island Journal, Neologism Poetry Review, Grey Sparrow, and the Ekphrastic Review, among others. Originally from Columbus, Ohio, he attended Kenyon college where he won the American Academy of Poetry prize.
