You hear the strays at midnight bay.

They own the parks. They know

suffering from the smell it gives,

the soup lines, the moldy bread

stacked in shattered bakeries.

Petrhaps they’re lucky.

Your avenues are filled with glass

and cutlery, kindergarten paintings

of quarter suns, blue clouds

drifting over notebook paper.

In a sidewind an old man twists,

wondering what happened

to his jacket, his closet,

his granddaughter. One moment

they were there, the next the plaster

cracking, the dust, the end

of most known things. To be there

was to know dying precise.

Beneath you the earth still moves,

still seeks to readjust itself.

You say it’s done enough, you say

your old man sleeps tonight

on cardboard and no longer

feels the fracture in his arm.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American literature at Dokuz Eylül University.