Animals drift out there

              in the monotonous green
                            of Chernobyl
 
A fact known to most of us
              theoretically
              which is to say
                            photographically
 
They use the magnetic fields

              of the earth to find their way
              & develop a cryptography
                            for the centuries
                            to which we are not invited
 
Parentheticals

              littering a final corner
              of this intestinal kingdom
 
until the sea gulps
our world of metal
down like an oyster
 
and the heat

              having waylaid the ice
              wraps a plush robe of steam
 
around us         leading us to the edge
              of everything
 
Bless us, then
 
         —​  having actually written the thing
              and written it again

              and laid it out before us— 
 
Bless us, that
we will be still
 
              astonished
 
eyes skyward
 
              open mouths

              little drowned fowl
 
Memorizing
 
              the red carpet

              rice thrown at weddings
              the ark on the mountaintop
 
              how we had lorded
              over the wheel             like a God
              inflammable

Alison Powell’s first book of poems, On the Desire to Levitate, was awarded the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and published by Ohio University Press in March 2014. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Boston Review, Copper Nickel, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She is Assistant Professor of Poetry at Oakland University, where she is current faculty adviser of the international undergraduate magazine The Oakland Arts Review.