Garrett Stack

 
Borrow Pit

Here where it’s flat
they dig holes and use the dirt
to build bridges.

The bridges span the railroads
while the holes
fill with rain.

Three boys died
in Etna last week
trying to jump the tracks.

Up front, the conductor
felt the impact
through a mile and a half of train.

That’s a hundred
CN Railroad cars
all shivering hard.

There wasn’t enough
of the boys left over
to open up the caskets.

The conductor
is thinking
about quitting now.

He wonders why
they couldn’t just go
swimming instead.

He used to tread
water there in the same
borrow pit.

He’d watch the big
diesel trains go by
under the sandpaper moon.

You could hear them cry
all the way from the next crossroads
so many miles from home.

Driving home from meeting my niece

I’m headed back toward
Normal with her newborn scent
still folded into my coat

and the trees are bleeding
through this shortened fall
like actors in a backstage quick-

change. The radio reports
the billionaires say it’s not that bad
beyond the window, that things

could actually be much worse
from a climatological perspective.
But the understudy oaks

leaning out from the shelterbelt
to grab the last of the spotlight
seem to understand it best. And yet

every time I move, I’m washed
once more in the smell of five day old
like a little gift given again and 

again. Back east, she lies swaddled,
her future beyond the curtain just
as opaque as her still clouded eyes.
 

Garrett Stack is the author of Yeoman's Work (Bottom Dog Press, 2020) and Advice for the Boys (Cornerstone Press, forthcoming 2026). He is Middle Western. website

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