Trigger Warning
In my landlocked city where the rivers meet seagulls
circle the sunrise to the slow crash of traffic.
On what body do they land? What salt water holds them aloft,
warm in a rising sky—dirt run-off from sanded streets? Or
Meltwater puddles brined with winter sludge, snowbank bedded
with broken boxsprings, sprung mattresses, cigarette butts, all the
dog shit I didn’t find steamed through to the bottom.
Crocuses. Parking tickets fluttering off the dash. Green buds on trees.
The light carries just the promise of lilacs, but the geese drone brackets
into a grey laundered morning. The smoke stench of sewer sugar beets
from the neighourhood outfalls. Backyards heat-shimmer all their
personal rinks into icy retention pools. Ravens collect from potholes
and black flood gutters shiny needles. Construction rises
from its frozen grave, all those abandoned pylons, orange omens
rolled like rocks before the tomb. This shit happens the third
month of every year, and we forget how winter malingers. The geese
honk and hiss and the city aerates its stolen land and
the gulls wheel through the zipper merge exhaust to taste
all that brine on the air, blown four hundred leagues
to touch prairie brown and black and green.