MIDSUMMER GRAY
BY JAMES HOCH
Out on the Baltic
the sea has forgotten itself
in the dissolving sky,
oil tankers like whales
like ghosts of whales
vaguing through light.
Horizon collapsing
into salt into plastic into vein,
Jonah so toxic and plural,
bird song, tree song, smoke song–
Once, down the road here,
bodies from Sachsenhausen
spilled out of a lorry.
And they knew, they knew–
Ash sun, ash earth,
ashen mouths of children
stained awful with berries.
Stack flare in a nightless night.
It used to be no one
spoke like this. There was
some distance, lines
between brutalities.
There was decorum,
a matter of perspective.
Now the world is slab gray,
a tongue where we break red
belong and sever back to
the singing inside us.
