Chris Sindt
Death Valley
Pupfish
Swimming in their own
Warm pools
Shoshone poisoned
Nothing
Left but salt
91% of the wetlands
Stolen and what’s left
Chalky rocks
Alluvial fans
They’ve built a museum
To deceit
The earth
Pounding
Like unbalanced laundry
Rocky detritus
With aprons on
Avoiding news
That isn’t poetry
The flood rolls its debris
Onto the floor
Like gift wrapping
You are
Standing on the story
Garden
Morning fog, my leavened
birds, what’s credential
for you and certainty
for her? I am smaller
than I feel. Laws of lips, laws
of hair, laws of where, and
where are the immutable
laws of legs and arms?
Let the story smolder
till the earth is spherical.
To speak of love
that hardened and left,
a plea,
oppressed, a sea of
authoritarian lack. What
will stack dominion
on adam and eve?
The sea is a garden and
the earth made of feelings.
Christopher Sindt‘s poetry has apeared recently in noctures, Pool, Swerve, and Xantippe. He has received the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation and residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Mesa Refuge, and the Blue Mountain Center. He directed the MFA Program in Creative Writing from 2000-2007 and is currently Associate Dean of the School of Liberal Arts.