Poetry from Gabrielle Campagnano

Reporting

Original image via Wikipedia

The corpse was longer than the grand piano
…………they found that same year
…………………..while dredging for nothing they pulled up:
……………………………..rusting steel enforcement bars, rats still alive
though punctured through the brain
…………and flailing from a grab spoke, engine
…………………..blocks. The skeleton of a giraffe.
Being without a face, it was difficult
…………to determine the exact point
…………………..of impact. A capsized circus vessel
……………………………..is implied in the very nature
of seventy inches of vertebrae, still
…………clinging to one another and
…………………..wrapped in water celery and lying
on the bank of the Hudson River
…………like some open parenthesis
…………………..on the edge of a damp, lifeless
……………………………..line. Tell them the animal may have known.
The animal may have fallen gracefully.
…………The animal may have already been
…………………..on its way out. Oh, Being-Without-A-Face,
…………………………………………tell them about racing through water
the color of metal. Tell them about the men
…………boating that day and laughing as though
…………………..they were made entirely of fire.
……………………………..So be our disheveled expressions.
We have left you out for nothing
but the distraction of light.

Gabrielle Campagnano is an MFA candidate at Vermont College of Fine Arts and a teacher in New Haven, Conn. Her work has appeared in Salamander Magazine, The Cossack, and Tule Review, among others. She is at work on her first full-length collection.