JOLENE BRINK
Prediction
Civilizations have been collapsing
since the first hawk circled Mt. Ararat
and fingers grasped for Venus
over fires lit with redwood.
How do you praise the apocalypse?
Teach politicians to chase
lightning bugs.
Collect buckets of rain.
Plant children
who grow
roots.
Cemeteries
Hunter, North Dakota
After 95 years,
Ellen chose July for her brief illness,
avoiding her deepest fear:
a winter inside the morgue,
waiting for the ground to thaw
instead of stepping lightly
into the earth
just below the sky.
Vienna, Austria
Instead of a café,
we found wrought-iron gates
wrapped with ivy,
tucked at the end of a street,
where the dead
waved us past
and nobody
mentioned
it again.
Finland, Minnesota
There are no marble headstones
among the brown chanterelles,
no granite markers or fresh bouquets.
But the Finnish children who died early,
and their parents buried nearby,
keep the best mushrooms
in Cook County.
Jolene Brink is a poet and journalist from northern Minnesota. Her work has appeared in Camas and Studio 1, and is forthcoming from Dislocate, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Rufous City Review. Jolene works for the University of Minnesota College of Design.
