Fifty-Two Card Pickup
// Dane Hamann
The aluminum dock groans
as it returns to knife-blade
coolness in the August-seared
bowl of a prairie lake. My mind
plays fifty-two card pickup
with the scattered hours
as the low creak of conversation
weaves between tree branches
and screen doors. The night
is strewn about to fade and melt
in the embers of a bonfire snapping
defiantly at a soup of stars.
A hunger burns too, first
in the far-off hollowness
of thigh bones, then right above
the heart. A need to consume
shadows and drink up the obsidian
slab of lake water, to find and file
every hidden thing within the raked
coals of these passing moments.