The Danube River, Croatia
The arteries of the earth are drying up—
Lifeblood river that birthed a waltz
recedes, along with phantom dancing girls
in bustled white gowns, the feather flight
cadence of twirling in a fairy tale ends,
as the Danube gives up her real ghosts—
the broken ship’s steel hulks.
Swastikas grinning up from the past,
explosives still live after all these years,
saying this has always been just
beneath the surface, waiting.
Lake Mead, Nevada
They were seeking a beaver dam,
looking for feats of animal engineering
on the largest reservoir in America—
A testament to our will to hold back
the Colorado, to make deserts bloom
and sprout feathered showgirls,
once poised on the strip like stalking egrets.
It was a different white that caught them—
the glint of tibia, bullet broken mandible,
the length of mud-slick ulna that testified
this is no natural place, of life or death—
Our crimes against the land and each other
will always rise up—emerge,
Ourense Province, Galicia, Spain
Another reservoir gives up phantoms —
Orderly and regimental, blocks of stone
stand sentry over nothing but ashy mud
as the water recedes from the place
Roman Legionnaires once slept,
ate their spelt bread, mended broken
Caligae sandals while sitting by watchfires
on power’s sharp knife edge—the expansive
lust for land, for slaves, for jars of olive oil,
glistening like peridots when poured out.
There’s always someone harvesting the poor
Pressing till their ooze of blood lubricates
the gears of their power. What remains
are cobbled roads they marched down,
the stark outline of their owned daily lives.
Glen Rose, Texas
The river is drawn away by drought’s
hand, reveals the plays of eons
before, the dramas and workaday banality
fearsome form of Acrocanthosaurus,
busy tearing flesh of the weaker for lunch,
or simply walking through mud, as any
living thing has—girl, shorebird, dinosaur—
Our heft sinking into the mire, weight
from our very bones leaving indelible marks
beneath the water, beneath pressure
and inevitable death, sediments that laugh
and layer upon our footsteps or bones,
leaving an epitaph that emerges—
A preview of our own deaths.
Jasmine Marshall Armstrong
Jasmine Marshall Armstrong’s poetry is influenced by the grit and glamor of growing up working class in California. A writing teacher, journalist and a poet, she has published poetry in Cathexis Northwest Press, Typishly, America Magazine, Poets Reading the News, In Parenthesis, Solo, Sojourners Magazine, Askew, Ulu Review, “We Are Beat,” the National Beat Poets Anthology and numerous other anthologies. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Fresno State University, and an MA in World Cultures/Humanities from the University of California.