I could hold up my phone and learn what bird makes this call like six cuts of a spade followed by a long sigh, but a house going up needs more to hold onto: repetition, perhaps, or a brief un- knowing. Meanwhile, six months for the science building to fall, and still not really down. Backhoes bow through their rough archeology as if grazing on the foundation. All spring I watched cranes claw open the classrooms, marked weeks to summer by floors razed which sounds like gone up but is spelled like piles of torn concrete, more wire than you’d think now gathered like snarled hair, the nest gone wrong. There’s a fence to protect us from it, or protect it from us. I couldn’t really see change until I was gone— then the difference when I returned, sky where there hadn’t been sky. Now birds, a chickadee flying to the feeder for a single peanut he takes to the tree. Back, then away. Five peanuts. Winging off through the pollen that floats like asbestos, a man on a lift to spray it with water, keep away from our lungs. Below him, another machine stalks through looking for salvage.
Laura Donnelly (she/her) is the author of Midwest Gothic (Ashland Poetry Press) and Watershed (Cider Press Review), and her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Missouri Review, Poets.org, SWWIM, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Originally from Michigan, she lives in Upstate New York and teaches at SUNY Oswego.
