The day we made the world, scattered shattered sand across the deep steeps and hollows of the sea, we were playing with chance, a stance few other gods admired. We retired then from creation and let things sing as they would, go to whatever end luck called good. We could, and did, breathe in a platypus here, a shearwater there – evolution our solution to dogma and fate, the weight of always being in charge of stars, shoals, plague, all that – but by and large, we let go, let sweat and thought fall away, stray like questing possums or blossoms of blown snow. So it was. We didn't worry how our sowing would grow. We went back to hacking with our thick black bills at death and waste, harrying carrion, even as the dead bled ever more numerous over the new true-straight stone roads, here where we shaped the bright turns and returns of the world, invited night in: but do that, and you get what you get. Despised asflies, we pick through pale grass for carcasses gone flat and dry; we rise under your very wheels from meals scant and cold, bring strings of gut back to our young. But so goes the world, when you let it go, throw yourself in its rolling motion, chance chance: we live on broken squirrels in the world we made this way.
Catherine Carter’s poetry collections with LSU Press include Larvae of the Nearest Stars (2019), The Swamp Monster at Home (2012), and The Memory of Gills (2006), with By Stone and Needle forthcoming in fall 2025. Her work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2009, among others. Born and raised on the eastern shore of Maryland, she now lives in Cullowhee, North Carolina, where she is a professor of English Education at Western Carolina University.
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0)
