I Ask My Sister's Ghost to Write Her Own Elegy
       

Since the attempts I've made fall short.
She leads me to the creek

where she spent her last years
testing toxins for the state.

The place is nothing special, a slash
between two developments, a twinkie wrapper,

cigarette butts embedded in the bank.
That's how nature in the city is, the allure

emerges only after many visits, flora
noticed by a patient eye—You're doing it again,

she interrupts, describing the land instead of me.
She points towards the water.

In the shallows a crayfish pretends to be a stone.
Then what should I tell people? I ask.

Most days, she says, she just waded in,
let the crayfish crawl over my feet.

She knew them like she knew lovers' scars,
their cleft claws, their ridged antennae.

When the crayfish population quartered,
she told the council it was the sediment

from their new construction.
Say my death was not an act of violence.

Removing a human mind, a mouth to feed,
she says, is a kind of generosity.

I wade up to my knees, I want to feel something
crawl across my feet.

An aluminum lid floats past,
my little raft, my paper lantern.

There is only one dam between us
and the coast. There are the soy fields

and almond groves leeching
nitrous clouds into the river.

I hope there is an entrance
to the cold, thrashing sea.

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Copyright © 2022 Benjamin Gucciardi All rights reserved
from West Portal
The University of Utah Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission