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Get Cara Losier Chanoine’s writing in the FREE PDF file 2013 poetry chapbook How a Bullet Behaves				You can also order this as a 2013 6" x 9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book! Click on the cover spread for the book How a Bullet Behaves

Deconstructive Criticism

Cara Losier Chanoine

In the dark,
the tall machines turn eerie,
like resurrected dinosaurs.
I imagine they are weary.
Their heads are bowed low,
the posture of deference
or defeat.
Tonight,
perhaps it is
a little bit of both.

I think of people native to our country,
tanning animal hides to make shelters with,
of pioneers sweeping loose dirt from
the floors of their dugouts,
of barn raising parties.
I think of all the people who never thought
that it would come to this,
that development could ever mean destruction.

In this city,
there are entire lives conducted
between a cubicle and a television set,
without once bearing witness to the splendor
of the stars.
In this city,
There are twelve drugstores,
five Wal-marts
And not enough forest to stave off the apathy.

In this city,
there is a child building a fort
out of scraps from the dump.
The base is the X
of two ancient, fallen birch trees,
lashed together with strips of tire,
peeled like the single spiral of an apple skin.
Then, the walls of rotted plywood.
Then, a discarded length of chain-link fence.
Time slips away from him as he fills a moat
with buckets of water
which, within hours, will be soaked
back into the earth from which they came.
The mud seeps through the knees of his jeans
and stains his skin.

Not far away
the construction site is quiet
with the absence of the foreman and his crew.
In the trailer, their hardhats
hang like eggshell halves.
Out front, a billboard touts
the pre-fab condominiums
that will fill this space.
On the sidewalk is graffiti
in the shape of a pine tree.

People who live in brownstones
rarely pause to think
that stones brown in color
are really just bricks
laid by masons whose overalls
are stained with their dust.
In this city,
a child sees the heads of tractors
through the trees behind his fort.
Like Don Quixote, he imagines they are giants
waiting to be slain.

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