BRIGHAM ROAD AND THE FOLLOWING SUMMER

At the clinic they gave you a paper bag of pills
and none of us opened our mouths on the drive
home. Our apartment full of flies born in empty
beer bottles that were left by the fridge. Black tape hanging

like streamers from the ceiling to gather tiny bodies in
with some chemical pretending to be sugar enough
to lick. You took the ultrasound from the nightstand,

packed it away as carefully as a gift. We stripped
the bed to its frame, sheets and comforter put in the back
of a rusting van, washed chalk from the bricks with Everclear
when gasoline didn’t work, then drank until our stomachs turned

like curdled milk. Then came the summer of Champagne
from the bottle, vomiting bubbled froth in the backyard
by the light of road flares, anything to keep our bellies

full. Bodies fucked in a bounce-house by the train tracks
as we lit floating lanterns in an open field. The earth began to leak
mud and salt, and water came and tried to drown
the sound of it all and you and I, lying there, flat on our soaking backs.

IN THE SPRING, DUNKIRK, NEW YORK 

smells of dog food from the Purina plant and you can taste it
in the air when it rains or the fog is thick
enough. The coal from the factory is piled on the pier and leaks
into Lake Erie as it turns and spits the small yellow perch from its stomach.

Canada Way Creek is littered with the ashes of camp fires,
and cans of beer, and handles of liquor, and empty capsules
of Adderall bought in wax-paper cups
with the money of proud suburban mothers for three dollars a pill.

The fairgrounds that once held German prisoners of war and sent them
to work in the grape fields now has demolition derbies
and amateur wrestling matches. When the two brothers who sell burgers
between the strip club and the hair salon climb into the ring
they are loved by everyone. They are good people, give the college girls
hamburger buns when it is clear they have had too much to drink
and the boys side-eye when they get the wrong idea.

In the next town my friend buys cocaine from the apartment
above the Irish pub, and the dealer’s brother is the judge,
and the dealer owns the Irish pub, and all the patrons are townies or racists or both.

They say there is a billboard in Miami reading: Come North to Dunkirk,
and the immigrants are only given the option to work the line
at the largest frozen production center this side of the Mississippi.
John worked there for a winter, says anything is better
than the steel mill. It’s good money making ice-cream—lunch break at dawn
and cold as all hell, but better than falling into a thick vat of pig-iron.