All the Animals
Lately everything feels
burdensome—the rifts in the pavement,
the snow, which piles up in drifts
my landlord never plows.
My friend calls from Los Angeles,
where his father has finished
his first round of chemotherapy.
In the light, my friend says,
he looked terrible, placid and small
in the hospital bed. When he walked,
he dangled a bundle of cords.
My friend pauses to merge—the 2,
I suspect, a road I once took daily
from Pasadena to Silver Lake,
Silver Lake to Pasadena.
From the asphalt ridge, the sunset
never looked more beautiful.
I made so many mistakes in that city:
I bought expensive bathing suits,
I lent out my copy of Slouching
Towards Bethlehem on a second date
and never recovered it. That year,
there was fire—licking the stop signs,
flitting across the San Gabriels.
The sky turned a plump orange;
the pinecones burned and burned.
I thought I would learn something then—
about courage, or what to say
when everyone I knew was suffering.
Instead, I scrounged
lemons from the yard and whittled them
to garnishes while the citrus trees
dried up. This year,
it rains in Los Angeles for weeks,
and the doctors can’t answer
any of my friend’s questions.
He sends me videos of the river
glutted with water,
snapping at the ankles of the trees.
I try hard to remember not everything
is irrevocable. In reality
many things are changing, they are planting
aster and delphinium in the lot
by my house and the red-winged blackbirds
have returned, heaving
low trills across the sidewalk.
They came on the first warm day,
and on the day after that, the sky
flung snow all over them. When God
drowned all the animals,
I wonder what happened to all the fish.
Amanda Lin Hayes writes poetry about a variety of human and more-than-human animals. Originally from Arlington, Virginia, she currently lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan and lectures in the English Department Writing Program at the University of Michigan. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was a Zell Fellow. You can read her work in Treble, The Margins, RHINO, Passages North, and elsewhere.
