Transparencies

TRANSPARENCIES

Over the vacant green we draped

a thin net of rivers, set the land rippling

with names turning in on themselves

like eddies. Mountains went over that, 

ranges mapping the vast distance 

between our desks and the thin air of all

we had yet to know. Next capital cities,

migration pattern of native species,

crop rotation, annual rainfall, 

dialects. During the test, though, 

when all of it was layered together, piled

on the late-afternoon hunger of our lives, 

the only answer many of us could provide

in the allotted time was that there’s a famine

somewhere in the region whose borders

we suddenly cannot seem to trace.