Driving through Damascus for the First Time,

Megan Krupa

 

Fall stretches her shoulders,

leaving only wisps of fog,

like tendrils of hair

wild and disordered, 

a brave exhalation of morning.

 

Someone considered important came here last year.

Breathing words and sentences into the mud.

 

Behind him, the American flag

tacked up against plywood 

like a paper napkin,

blanketing the stain of water, 

which left red-brown, smeared tracks

on the base of buildings and caked over gravel. 

 

They must have brought the mud back to D.C. 

 

With traces of Helene’s wrath wedged 

into the sole of a taupe, suede shoe, 

like a lunar rock, whose unfamiliar-ness 

fills the room with wonder

about how a place like this could end up there.

 

But it’s fall in Damascus.

 

The dewdrops stick to webs on the trees

before meeting the glassy, surface of a robin’s cornea,

causing an awfully brilliant refraction of light. 

Megan Krupa is the author of the poetry chapbooks, Heirloom and Holler. Her poetry appears in As the Crow Flies, Appalachia Bare, and the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. She is an Assistant Professor at East Tennessee State University.