Leah Hampton

What Takes You Away

Look, brother, I was wild; I never knew where our father went

after your wake

I left also, bugged out the same year, hiked the Franz Josef brotherless

and autumn was a pendulum—

ice sizzle, soprano melt, the two of you, ablation and accumulation,

call and response;

I suspect he kept trucking (wheels up and down roads, who knows),

my father. His son

broken, grown, shattered but in death a fresh babe new and small,

lost man still a bright boy in his hands;

all that newness frozen, blue inside white, what do you do,

what do you do

once you see the corpse of your own child? On the glacier I slipped—

ever unsteady. When cold bodies

split they call it calving, a destruction. We walked, mourned on Franz Josef

high seracs, jagged spine,

miles of thin ice, and me, I took my missing father’s daughter’s living

white bones alone along a crevasse

after melt, before the freeze, each packed step asking daddy will I die here

or here

To The Neighbor Who Stole My Trash Bin

I see your dirty chickens. Scrawny,

half plucked, looking for trouble

in the weeds. Your rooster keeps me

up nights. Crows when it shouldn’t

in the rain, in that thin hour between

tender dark and morning. And you

know which is mine because I spilled

Kilz in the bottom of that bin last fall,

where it dried in tendrils, white over

muck. Mow your goddamn lawn,

bro. Feed those hens. Our cats drool

for them, eye loose fowl behind panes.

Was it because you had too much? Or

that you wanted more? Mine was better

wheeled. Fit lidded. Now I bring all unto

you as offering. Cast my Clorox wipes

and fish skins, tallboys, mixed recyclables

over your ragged fence. Into that yarrow.

Better still into tamarisk, creeping thistle,

loosestrife for some good clean killing.

Reintroduction

I know the last wild specimen

died from a stone to the heart

hurled by a child hunting supper—

read that twice in two museums—

also we don’t have the full sequence,

not enough strands;

it will be an insufficient pigeon

they bring back, gap-gened

squab spliced with an instinct

for mirrored cities, juiceless breast,

less game in the flavor;

I want the lost dove, all original

bird or none, I want for old passengers

to remain extinct; it is enough

already, what we did the first time;

we’d only kill it off again

anyway

once a lover in a warm bath

took my wet foot in his wet hands,

pressed it to his lips, and—

we dried ourselves, is what I’m saying,

we dried ourselves completely out

then we went

home to our spouses

Leah Hampton is the author of F*ckface: And Other Stories (Henry Holt, 2020). Her work has appeared in Guernica, Appalachian Review, storySouth, Ecotone, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at the University of Idaho.

Artwork: “Wake” by Daniel Lurie

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