It’s ten at night & a Russian Orthodox
casket cover leans on the stairway wall
beside a three-wheeled, bright yellow
stroller, which normally blocks half
the outer entranceway & into which
some callous resident throws trash—straws,
flyers, empty cigarette packs, receipts—
until one day a note appears instead,
& reading it, our Kyrgyz friend is hesitant
to translate, then whispers, If you again
put trash into my child’s stroller, may God’s
wrath visit you, & ever after, I’ve felt the narrow
passage beside the stroller widen & widen.
Raphael Dagold’s poems, lyric essays, and photographs have recently appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Southern Review, Blackbird, Tupelo Quarterly, The Offing, North American Review, and The Normal School. Awards include the Mountain States Writers Award in Poetry, the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize, and fellowships from the Jentel Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center, among other honors. His first book, Bastard Heart, appeared in 2014, and was a finalist for the Utah Book Award. A second poetry manuscript, Relief Effort, is under review, and a collection of lyric essays and a third poetry manuscript—poems from Kyrgyzstan, where he taught at the American University of Central Asia from 2016-2018—are in the works. He has taught writing and literature at numerous other universities in the U.S. and abroad, and in the fall of 2020, he joined the English faculty at the Morristown-Beard School in Morristown, New Jersey.
I doubt these empty pockets
could produce a grave
or plot of land
or shovel—my fingers
cannot penetrate this
scorched, mountainous earth:
and always,
there is hunger.
