Two poems for Trae

China Township, Michigan

Trunk full of petals and afterbirth,
antlers stuck in the side door,
you drove into town, worth
your weight in natural resources.
Here fences aren’t for horses
and freight trains trundle by the stores –
miles nearer than the horizon
they ride at home.
You were useful there, in Michigan,
picked up skills that rose, like foam
on beer, from the land where you’d meet
God. Here, a tree can be as distant
from another as far as forty feet,
no matter the roots, however persistent.


Headaches

In all that countryside,
possibly, hid some nuclear waste
that could warp neurons.
You played there, hunted,
not deer, but small animals
with trails of dotted blood
where you picked off the weak one.
Was it the mother pheasant’s curse
that split thoughts into halves
of walnuts? or the orphaned
rodent's, who’d chewed
its leg from a trap to return
to its niche and found his offspring
sprung like convicts and his mate
hung on your mantle?