"Planned Community" by Kathy Fagan from THE ADROIT JOURNAL

Today's poem is by Kathy Fagan

Planned Community

Each day the houses resemble houses more and more—
wood frame, dry wrap, windows—
SOLD signs posted in front of every build.
I’m staying at one of the first houses
in the community, where my mother-in-law,
when awake, cries for her life from the hospice bed
she’ll die in. I can't help
but think of the new constructions as skeletons
of this one, or, more properly, progeny. The road I walk
is one version of what once was here—
deer path, Native trail, trade road—
life after life after life. She doesn't want a new one,
she wants the plan she bought,
with basement kitchen and fluorescent lights, Formica
counters and linoleum floor, the plastic tablecloths, two
stoves, refrigerator against the drywall, freezer
behind the cinderblock. Her spouse, restored.
Family, more family. Food and more food.
There was always more. I'm walking past it,
past the hammering to a recess in the earth too deep,
for now, to fill. Lucky trees
with their wet feet thrive there
and August blossoms thrive in sun at the roadside
above them. I don't want to write
about death anymore. I don't want to be
another dying one. I am walking the road,
the trail, the path. What is the opposite of ghost,
they ask. Wild carrot, curly dock, little bluestem.

Copyright © 2025 Kathy Fagan All rights reserved
from The Adroit Journal
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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