National Poetry Month: Ghost Fishing Excerpt One

In honor of Earth day this Sunday, we’ve decided to spotlight three poems from Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology edited by Melissa Tuckey. Ghost Fishing is a gathering of poetry at the intersection of culture, social justice, and the environment.

 

How To Disappear The Stars

Lauren Camp

If you let them build a book of houses, the edges of a small world

will shave to sawdust; the moon will blue and fade.

 

Solitude will redraw as red lines that tear

your golden land to tiny parcels.

 

Ground will shift south into a suburb of metal streets and silent birds,

a breathless spine of two-by-fours talking to limbless trees.

 

Each small mound of affected dirt will sprout into a web of structure,

a coagulating noise of walls and floors tumbling all at once in your ears.

 

Each feverish city will extinguish the horizon

and erase the blueprint

of your open sky.

 

Ghost Fishing edited by Melissa Tuckey