Mounds of sugar beets under
                         halogen, marooned in pressure
                         waves like fossil dinosaur turds.

                                    Lurid thunder eggs. And
                                  always the two Lebanese
                            brothers who walk and argue.

.
                      A six-year-old boy drowned in an
                 irrigation ditch. His father a tethered
                                     dirigible in white Adidas.

                      Church is headstones in hill rows
                          wearing in an unrelenting east
                               wind. Pacific as cheatgrass

It’s not personal when someone leaves, though
    they try to make it so—rumbling like a John
                Deere tractor with a bored aneurysm.

Craig Brandis has recently placed poems and reviews in Oxford Magazine, Palette Poetry, Parhelion, Trampoline, American Journal of Poetry, Poetry Quarterly, Plume, and elsewhere. His work was long-listed for the 2022 Berkshire prize for a first or second book of poetry prize and for the 2022 Sally Albiso prize. He writes from Lake Oswego, Ore.