Stephanie Dugger
No Explanation | Mike Stilkey
Music City
Someone left
a piano beside the river,
under the Hermitage Avenue bridge
where homeless had assembled Tent City—
a community on five acres
with its own security guards,
rules against drug use,
monthly meetings.
Music changes things, you said.
The river flooded,
washed away the interstate,
the capital, the boundaries.
New tents were raised in a farming field—
donated by the church we left
three years before
when we were curious,
obsessed with enchantment.
We proofread our rescues,
find the flaws,
replay them over and over.
We pretend the world will end,
stock up on essentials: drinking water,
bandages, flashlight, can opener.
Call this diligence.
We are prepared
for each other,
for guardianship and bluster.
We replay the same songs, too. The songs
that belonged to us after we met.
Watching our history
in the evening river,
we catch
those notes and the city’s season.
Bio
Stephanie McCarley Dugger’s chapbook, Sterling, is available from Paper Nautilus. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Calyx, CUTTHROAT, Gulf Stream, Meridian, Naugatuck River Review, The Southeast Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Zone 3 and other journals.