Lines Written on Jasper Beach, Machiasport, Maine by K.A. Hays

A being, who was pulled out of my body nine years ago,
is building a city of stone, stick, and tangled blue string
on top of what looks like a broken cage.

Scabs and mosquito bites speckle his legs and an elbow
and he yells over the surf in his high voice,
If this one tiny twig breaks,
the whole city is going to collapse.

Something chimes, then, like a bell
warning of the end times,
but it’s my iphone. I slide its sleek body
from my pocket, scan a notification:

BREAKING NEWS.
WE JUST EXPERIENCED THE HOTTEST JUNE ON RECORD
AND IT’S PART OF A LARGER TROUBLING TREND.

I’m reading when the city shifts, sticks slumping,
stones collapsing on the cage––
which isn’t only a cage, I can see now,
but a trap, built to lull and entice,

and I can almost see the insect-like shape
of all the beings who glided into it,
feeding slow in the waters, held,
before they were pulled out and boiled.

My child is squinching his forehead.
I know how to build it better, he says, dragging
toward his broken knees a red rock,
rhyolite smoothed by waves,

and balancing it on the trap, careful,
careful, as if he alone has been charged
with saving it all.

K.A. Hays is the author of Dear Apocalypse (2009), Early Creatures, Native Gods (2012), and Windthrow (2017). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Tin House, and other magazines. She lives in Lewisburg, PA and directs the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets.