Two Poems by Benjamin Goldberg

Eulogy for Week-Old Roadkill

Deer, anus-ways back.

Dear flesh, every dawn your hem
splayed along the shoulder,

crows lining up behind you
on the double-yellow no-passing line.

Dear deer, longitudinal cross-section
of the positions life leaves us in:

obsequious to the point
of vulgarity the tenderness attending

the end of you, peeling from you
the blanket of your traumas.

From any other direction, I will find you
as sunrise does: everything broken

visible, like a battered child
in fake sleep, one eye swollen,

half-open, caught between
watching and blinking.

Michigan Spring

This is where breath drags itself
from shallower breaths,
where the alluvial floodplain seeps

beneath its netting of dead
mosquitoes, where I am called
under the footbridge’s rusted trusses

out of the winds of a late snow
plunging my eardrums.

Places worth escaping are made
to endure so much ice, little else.

A gosling is learning flight
at the school of her broken wing.
The mother hisses if I move

even slightly, or if my eyes
are any color but the ground’s.