MICHAEL MCLANE
Terminal Burrowing
we are autonomous
more so at the end
the brain stem begs
the animal for sleep
and we dig towards
hibernation though
the sound of finger-
nails peeling back in
permafrost sickens the
part of us that knows
a mistake when we
see one you’ve seen them all the coal mine is a trap with picnic tables
and the only bathrooms for miles though the name of
the town—Ashland—is funny as we’d
looked for fire but found only its husk
and precipitate narrow-gauge railroad
a pornography of which we are nearly
connoisseurs of the life-size dioramas
at track’s end all these miners beneath
flammable headgear and the sparks of
recreated tools flash on walls luring us
lightning bugs or glowworms radiation
the earth’s ephemera recast low-watt
LEDs against which our eyes adjust and
somewhere between the nose and the amygdala we know that we are
home in the dirt and the only way out is down
friction warming the ways
blood red on the fingertips
even when freezing death
finds us tempered houses
we are mammalian winter
nesting beneath the beds
or the chest of drawers we
pull ourselves close to floor
carpet peeling off in clumps
and hold it close to primordial curl into it the way the track under such
weight can only bend a little at a time through
the Pioneer Mine the names makes us
uneasy to think they thought it best to
bring all the heat to the surface instead
of burrow and rest and all but disappear