My father tells me how they<\/p>\n
suffocated the lake<\/p>\n
by dumping autumn’s aborted leaves<\/p>\n
from blue tarps bright as the sky.<\/p>\n
Took them at least a decade<\/p>\n
of raking the raw red bodies,<\/p>\n
scythe-like, of white oaks,<\/p>\n
the yellow aspen bells,<\/p>\n
to see progress peeking its<\/p>\n
blighted crown from the dark<\/p>\n
kettle waters. How the rotten polish<\/p>\n
glistened with sog & murk.<\/p>\n
How you could see the thin memories<\/p>\n
hanging onto each other like<\/p>\n
puzzle pieces, even in death.<\/p>\n
How there was no forgetting<\/p>\n
the staunch wall of disgust<\/p>\n
& masking of noses. At first,<\/p>\n
on the boat, then on shore,<\/p>\n
finally the cul-de-sac.<\/p>\n
My father tells me never to go that far,<\/p>\n
stay away like how you keep so quiet.<\/p>\n
How he shouldn’t have harbored<\/p>\n
his silence deep in his belly.<\/p>\n
Migraines stay with me the way<\/p>\n
killing millions ended up killing one body.<\/p>\n
At the time, he says,<\/p>\n
what issue could have surfaced–<\/p>\n
not even the trees<\/p>\n
would keep their children.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My father tells me how they suffocated the lake by dumping autumn’s aborted leaves from blue tarps bright as the sky. Took them at least a decade of raking the raw red bodies, scythe-like, of white oaks, the yellow aspen bells, to see progress peeking…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":717,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/717"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23061"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23403,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23061\/revisions\/23403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23061"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23061"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepoetrymarathon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23061"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}