Where the?

This is a forest without trails

or rangers, not some national park.

The leaves are gray, the air is gray,

and gray grass chafes your footsteps. Snails

are gliding over smooth gray bark.

A queue is filing, beetle by beetle,

into a crevice in the ground,

but you—you’re lost. This place feels lost,

like, if you had a compass, the needle

would just keep spinning round and round.

Funny, your struggle to remember

life before this wooded plain.

Where is your past? The trees you passed?

Why is it always late September?

Why does it always look like rain?

Funny, the silence of the crows,

as if a squawk would violate

the silence here. The silence here,

part suspense and part repose,

grows and grows. You simply wait

for, what, the length of one long day

that never grows more dark or light?

Funny there’s not a west. It’s not

a matter of having lost the way.

No sun, no stars, no night.

Aaron Poochigian earned a PhD in Classics from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. His book of translations from Sappho, Stung With Love, was published by Penguin Classics in 2009, and his translation of Apollonius’ Jason and the Argonauts was released October 2014. For his work in translation he was awarded a 2010-2011 Grant by the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book of poetry, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), was published in 2012 and his second book Manhattanite, which won the 2016 Able Muse Poetry Prize, came out in December of 2017. His thriller in verse, Mr. Either/Or, was released by Etruscan Press in the fall of 2017. His work has appeared in such publications as Best American Poetry, The Paris Review and POETRY.