Scant sunlight through smoke filled skies
Clothes hung to dry gather grime
Two dead trees on Covert Avenue
Slag trucks rumble down Broadway
The humid heat of summer
Is never relieved by rain
On the lake carp float belly up…
When will enlightenment come?
How to traverse the abyss?
Illumination above
And danger resides below
The unsettled future looms
As the Cuyahoga River burns
This poem first appeared in Resurrection River Poems (2019).
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Joseph Bocchicchio is a poet whose work has appeared in Cutthroat, Entropy, Panning for Poems, Jawbone, Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine, Ovunque Siamo, Voices in Italian Americana, and three Edith Chase Symposium Chapbooks: Resurrection River Poems, Rewilding Ohio, and Cuyahoga River Poems. His story, Passing Through, was included in The Healer’s Burden: Stories and Poems of Professional Grief, and was nominated for a Pushcart by The University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine.
