Alaska
       

In the mist above Unalaska, the last harbor
of the Aleutian ferry line, we hiked a tight path
carved in the side of a rocky escarpment, pocked
with dug-in bunkers where they'd shot down
kamikazes in World War II.

I was there with a man I didn't love anymore.
He'd hit my son, called my daughter a bitch.
I watched him walk in front of me on his thin ankles,
imagined my palms shoving his shoulder blades,
gravity destroying him on rocks I barely saw below.

How easy it would be—
no dividing assets, no serving papers,
no $8,000 retainer to a chain-smoking lawyer.

But I knew I could never keep it quiet.
I love talking too much,
letting myself out into air and light
like a horse bucking from its dark stall.

That midnight, the light finally faded,
we staked a tent on an empty beach.
I pulled driftwood into a pile, dry and ready
for the touch of a match. The flames
shot up twenty feet, black smoke,
toxic as a venting volcano.

The dead trees, saturated with crude
spilled decades before, a thousand miles away,
in some catastrophic wreck.

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Copyright © 2019 Dion O'Reilly All rights reserved
from New Letters
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission