Fifty-Two Card Pickup

//

The aluminum dock groans
as it returns to knife-blade

coolness in the August-seared
bowl of a prairie lake. My mind

plays fifty-two card pickup
with the scattered hours

as the low creak of conversation
weaves between tree branches

and screen doors. The night
is strewn about to fade and melt

in the embers of a bonfire snapping
defiantly at a soup of stars.

A hunger burns too, first
in the far-off hollowness

of thigh bones, then right above
the heart. A need to consume

shadows and drink up the obsidian
slab of lake water, to find and file

every hidden thing within the raked
coals of these passing moments.