“Fracture,” Ellen Bass

When the grizzly cubs were caught, collared, and taken away—
relocated they call it—
their mother ran back and forth on the road screaming.
Brutal sound. Torn from her lungs. Her heart,
twisted knot, hot blood rivering
to the twenty-six pounding bones of her feet.
Just weeks before
I watched a bear and her cubs run down a mountain
in the twilight.
So buoyant, they seemed to be tumbling
to the meadow,
to the yarrow root they dug, rocking
to wrest it from the hard ground, fattening for winter.
They were breathing what looked like gladness.
But that other mother . . .
Her massive head raised, desperate to catch their scent.
Each footfall a fracture in the earth’s crust.

“It’s Always Something,” Sally Delehant

Yesterday the wind took our picture
off the wall over the piano; birds chirped
their curt symphonies in the box elder. I thought
of you— your obvious loveliness, your obliviousness
to lost things.   An ambulance blinks two lanes over,
a restaurant goes under, your little niece kicks off her shoe.

We pantomime infatuations, put on scarves.
you’ll never again speak to your father.   What was
once my knee in a theater is tired eyes at a kitchen sink;
we fall into us. A squirrel upsets the feeder, hangs by one leg
and reaches. (Even my feet are angry.) You tromp in
muddy leaves, test the alarm,   whisper lub-dub.

Silvered streets gird our apartment. I fasten
my parka   to leave. Everywhere muck, newspapers,
a blanket—   our neighbor in flip-flops has forgotten her key.
I daydream the ocean, your hand on my ankle.
I’ll walk without stopping, won’t care if I ever do. The wind can whip
its wants, can rattle each thing,   rip roofs from shingles

at angles. I’ll think of you—   forgetting
which switch is a light   and which the disposal,

climbing on my back at a carnival, quieting

after pendulum hung work days. The streetlights

have been on for an hour. Nothing will let me come to you.

From A Real Time of It (Cultural Society, 2012).

“Facts About the Moon,” Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us
an inch and a half each year. That means
if you’re like me and were born
around fifty years ago the moon
was a full six feet closer to the earth.
What’s a person supposed to do?
I feel the gray cloud of consternation
travel across my face. I begin thinking
about the moon-lit past, how if you go back
far enough you can imagine the breathtaking
hugeness of the moon, prehistoric
solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun
so completely there was no corona, only
a darkness we had no word for.
And future eclipses will look like this: the moon
a small black pupil in the eye of the sun.
But these are bald facts.
What bothers me most is that someday
the moon will spiral right out of orbit
and all land-based life will die.
The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing
the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields
in check at the polar ends of the earth.
And please don’t tell me
what I already know, that it won’t happen
for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid
of what will happen to the moon.
Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon.
Maybe we once did but not now
after all we’ve done. These nights
I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling
around alone in space without
her milky planet, her only love, a mother
who’s lost a child, a bad child,
a greedy child or maybe a grown boy
who’s murdered and raped, a mother
can’t help it, she loves that boy
anyway, and in spite of herself
she misses him, and if you sit beside her
on the padded hospital bench
outside the door to his room you can’t not
take her hand, listen to her while she
weeps, telling you how sweet he was,
how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only
romanticizing, that she’s conveniently
forgotten the bruises and booze,
the stolen car, the day he ripped
the phones from the walls, and you want
to slap her back to sanity, remind her
of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup,
a little shit, and you almost do
until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes
two craters, and then you can’t help it
either, you know love when you see it,
you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.