Today's poem is by Gale Marie Thompson

Turnover
       

In the time it took to produce
this sentence, the spinal

shadow of my house has leaned
its wet angle over the yard

so completely, a massacre
so small—yet loved, like

the family lick of the herd—
that it ripples out into the yard

and to the warrens underneath,
near the moldering orange

with its slack rind,
and the gully's mouth

torn open
like a birthday streamer—

because the earth betrays
as it scrapes away

like some black treadmill,
so that from underneath

races a land so struck
with its own disappearance,

that the folded fawn knows
each strangling ramp is right

on the verge of opening,
and that the dip of hoofprint

bears witness to the jaw
cracked slack,

to colony collapse,
how little and yet

how much it matters
to count the dead.

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Copyright © 2023 Gale Marie Thompson All rights reserved
from Colorado Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission