by Grant Clauser

Say there’s enough ruin to go around.
Say the song the bats keep to themselves
is a song of longing, calling out
to the night’s open palm when the difference
between a palm and fist is what you know
about words. Like ruin – the kind covered
by decades or weeds, a word that changes meaning
when the land changes hands. The news today
says kids are breaking. What they know
is the ground is shaking underneath them
and believe that’s all the future has for them.
Not the answer to the bat’s night song.
Not the way grain in an old silo
will sprout or mold depending on the whims
of weather or whether this abandoned farm
means someone picked up and moved, or
curled up and died alone like some cryptid
only fanatics truly believe.
We can’t move on. The world’s smaller
than a palm now. It’s only when evening
over this forgotten place starts seeping
up from the ground and cloaking every color,
every sound hidden by another,
that for an hour you can’t tell
the birds from the bats
but for their song.

Grant Clauser (@uniambic) is the author of five books, most recently Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven (winner of the Codhill Press Poetry Award). His poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Kenyon Review, and other journals. He works as an editor in Pennsylvania and teaches at Rosemont College.