Today, all the old houses
have hidden harrowed humans,
and the midden of their captors,
their own enduring bodies--
or so it seems when the flask
from the inside jacket pocket offers
us our ruin: society on the news.
Even the laureate of Fresno
turns a stick-up into stature,
lines of brutal fighting in his corner
market. As usual the armed forces
are a locked room in a foreclosed
house with a girl pounding
on a dirty window. We wonder
who she is, but not ourselves,
frowning on the doorstep.
Amy Holman is the author of Wrens Fly Through This Opened Window, published in 2010 with Somondoco Press. The news is one of her favorite sources for topics, and poems have previously appeared in New Verse News. Recent poetry and prose is in The Same, Marco Polo Arts Magazine, and Zocolo Public Square. She teaches poetry at The Hudson Valley Writers Center, and is a literary consultant in Brooklyn, NY.