Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Poems

Tract

– Vilnius, Lithuania

The turgid slopes of the riverbank Flooded with the road’s effluvia After the martial taps of rain Writhe in a kind of miasmal stew Similar to that in which life began. The ruin of an outlook lingers With fluorescent tags marking it Lost to “good” society. Though lovers Once came here to see, seeing Themselves in the scene – not The Jewish cemetery across the stream, Replaced by a brutalist wave cresting into A present that never arrives, the pace Of progress stalled in space, boarded up, Pushed out of mind like this place Where new people arrive to hide, imbibe, Or generally degenerate among crumbling Concrete blocks – a political system erased By its own hands, but its replacement Has yet to resurrect this tract. It’s humbling: The ruin lies beside the bus stop, within The shadow of the ancient castle, itself Rebuilt. You can still come and see the body, Washed up on shore like a victim waiting For the relative weighing of virtue and sin.

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