Julia C Alter

Migration Season in Vermont

after Bread & Puppet

She lifts her cello bow from the strings
to ask, if my home is rubble where do I live? 

A cello and fifteen human voices humming
can approximate the sound of a drone. 

We tolerate it, for approximately one minute.
Shift in our pews, lean into our discomfort.

It’s understood we’re here to feel. A circular saw
chops and clatters in a metal bowl filled with air. 

A ghost put it there. A glass teardrop, flash-lit,
is lowered to the dirt floor. 

Think mosquito, but multiplied by nightmares, the buzzing
that fells olive branches, olive trees.

The black drone, a child’s wooden airplane.
The dog, the soldier, the general, the prime minister. 

Then, American president. Then, American voter. Trace the lineage
of any monster, and at the end of the line you’ll only find yourself. 

Someone says thank you, rain, and you step out into it,
reach towards a rosy-cheeked dancer in a white tunic 

who hands you bread spread with garlic. Up in the sky,
birds from Mexico and Panama have decided

they’re home now because the sky is where they’ve always lived.
In the sky, they carry each other’s names.

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Julia C Alter is the author of Some Dark Familiar (Green Writers Press), selected by Matthew Olzmann as the winner of the 2023 Sundog Poetry Book Award, and a finalist for the 2024 Vermont Book Award in Poetry. Her poems have been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize and appear in numerous journals and anthologies. She lives in Vermont with her son.