Not unafraid of the Taliban takeover.
Waiting for what happens through the bars and veils.
What about the whale that washed up on the private beach?
They couldn’t find anyone to relieve them of the stench.
Still we smiled at the red boots on the big furry dog, turned our heads away
from the man with bare stumps where his feet should have been.
We go by way of the wood, each of us an inscrutable world heating up, compressing
to a petrified rock.
Who can imagine the last notes of a whale song?
Stirring the trees, the wind rubs each leaf, the tree buried in moss, a stick pointing the way
to the valley hidden in a froth of clouds.
The eyelash I couldn’t find kept poking my eye. Each hair leaves a hole
no longer discernable.
In the sleep of the homeless, the drifter goes on unheard,
deep in our pockets, the forgotten still breathe.
Barbara Siegel Carlson is the author of What Drifted Here (Cherry Grove, 2023), Once in Every Language (Kelsay, 2017) and Fire Road (Dream Horse, 2013). She is the co-translator (with Ana Jelnikar) of Look Back, Look Ahead, Selected Poems of Srečko Kosovel and co-editor (with Richard Jackson) of A Bridge of Voices: Contemporary Slovene Poetry and Perspectives. Her poetry, translations and essays have appeared in Verse Daily, Cortland Review, Mid-American Review, Salamander, Slovene Studies and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart prizes. A fourth book of poems The Current is forthcoming in 2026.
