Fracas in the Street
I saw him on Shattuck,
shouting God knows what––
a man new to madness,
wading half asleep through time, consuming himself.
Trees open to hushed
pastures of cheat grass.
Crickets hatch all at once in the brush, devouring those before them,
earth heaving in waves,
crusts crackling
like the rustling of pique`.
I’ve known storms of dust
to darken what light remains and the sudden lunge
of shadows in the road
when madness waited, fevered to be fed.
Zara Raab’s books are Swimming the Eel and The Book of Gretel. Rumpelstiltskin, a finalist for the Dana Award, will be published later this year, along with Fracas & Asylum. She is a contributing editor of Poetry Flash and Redwood Coast Review.
This poem was first published in California Quarterly