Cockroach enamors              a forgiving door
Where’s your cord to history?
Desk’s weight, that
grand canyon. Only so much sitting
so much of the eponymous brown
bag. I’ve been unruly,
lost the keys (the frosted glass
neighbors don’t peak)

Highway, behind a car with lost letters:
CAPITAL SUBURB
Precise, correct, like
****************a boat on water

Look, it’s trash day again and
the wind gropes cool

Birds are named out the sky
****************(the manly thing to do)
Family tree hangs on the fridge, waiting or amended

I’ve lost all the pictures of the family jewels
Mistakes are laid
********down like forks

I’m sorry. You’re spring
****************loaded                     You ask why we should eat
when there’s fire
Eat me please               please
please eat me but where are your edges?

Here the yardstick is king
Haven’t you all heard the expression
a forest can’t hide crouched behind trees

Please tide us over or
tide out the wreck because
the bronze men are removed by night
hardhats and the city is content
this is not the kind of nation where
every town has a square
and every square a wall
of names

No matter how far we drive into
the hills we are
always on the edge
of a bad neighborhood

Rows of young lavender
are planted in black bark
and the last string
of lights is unwrapped from
the maple tree, top to bottom

The cliché is ‘raised by
wolves’                  Not raised, but
suckled, not wolf but
she-wolf

Ask what regrets

*

Emma Train is a poet from Berkeley, California. A graduate of UC Davis’s MFA program in creative writing, she is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is writing her dissertation on contemporary queer ecopoetics. Her poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the Berkeley Poetry Review, the Colorado Review, Grist, and Interim. She was most recently a finalist for the 2020 Omnidawn Open Book Prize and a finalist for Interim’s 2020 Test Site Poetry Series.