Claire Caldwell: A Poem
SOUNDS A RIVER MAKES
Gas leak, ventilator, bear clicking its teeth.
Twelve hundred caribou hooves on frost.
Lips around bottle, bottle slurring
on bar. Rattling aspen, dusky grouse,
sheets drying outside. Grandmothers
stuffing envelopes in a high school gym.
Sex in a sleeping bag, house on fire.
A children's choir after one kid
faints, before the rest start to sing.
from Gold Rush by Claire Caldwell, Invisible Publishing, 2020