Brandon Krieg
Stars in the Basement
I.
Goofing on Col’s feet, Ez slips,
breaks a tooth jagged.
“Get the metal out of my mouth!”
Later, sneaking up on the backyard rabbit, his smile
a new type of smile, new
as the yellow under-wings of the grasshopper flying.
II.
“There are grasshoppers at my school.”
He sleeps on his cot in the row.
His chest rises and falls.
His lungs small as an open mussel shell.
His teachers scroll through their phones.
“I suppose the big problem would be
that we would fall down and worship each other.”
III.
“Get your words out of my mouth.”
Trapped in the basement, a grasshopper’s
steady stridulation through the vents,
sound of stars to me, I’ve got stars
in the basement with the Christmas tree stand,
the washing machine,
but nothing like in winter when clouds part
above the ice crust: that shock
of star silence.
That’s like glimpsing through the open
back door Ezra’s concentrating face
carefully brushing from the onion shoots we planted
April snowflakes.
Brandon Krieg reads “Stars in the Basement”
Brandon Krieg’s most recent poetry collections are Receiver (Herring Alley Pamphlets, 2021), and Magnifier (Center for Literary Publishing, 2019), winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry chosen by Kazim Ali and a finalist for the 2022 ASLE Book Award in Environmental Creative Writing. He teaches at Kutztown University and lives in Kutztown, PA.