After a bad night,
Goya might have invented turkeys.

Almost swamped by ink,

Snow, rocks darker than any shadow in the world.
We glimpsed another life below us—cottages, goats—

But never imagined it would be so difficult.

I take the dusty yearbook off the shelf
and scan the fledgling, mostly white, male faces:
a foreign country, but the aging self

I kept it hidden, it was easy
to hide, behind my lingerie, a shoebox

above my boys' reach, swaddled alongside

In Classical Attica it wasn't heinous,
tanned Danaan hands consigning cherubs
to the gods' protection, to die in earthen pots.

Neck pulled back. Wrists tied. Weight pops
shoulder from socket. All disjunction.
So many Judgment Days. Hell absorbs us

The vegan gourmet will have his way. Lamb chops
will soon be relegated to quaint cabins in the olden days.
The ballooning business of burgers, too, will change,

Half the time I’m counting my cash
   like Jacob Marley in hell
and the other half throwing it out the windows

yet when I ask my dentist why he left Russia, he says,
    “Oh, life there is insupportable.”
Where is it not? I think with something approaching despair,

N    ot a flower that flares and falters
I    s lost when the angel of night appears