Charles Rafferty’s most recent collections of poems are The Smoke of Horses (BOA Editions, 2017), Something an Atheist Might Bring Up at a Cocktail Party (Mayapple Press, 2018), and The Problem With Abundance (Grayson Books, 2019). His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O, Oprah Magazine, Gettysburg Review, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. He has won grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism. Currently, he directs the MFA program at Albertus Magnus College and teaches at the Westport Writers’ Workshop.
EVOLUTION
The ice used to be a mile thick above your house, and every now and then, the river uncovers a shard of Colonial flatware, an arrowhead, a piece of beer bottle incapable of cutting anything. The fragments add up. They tell us the story of how nothing can stay the same. I no longer worry that caterpillars are destroying my only oak. I don’t care if the Planning and Zoning Board approves another nail salon. Whenever you say that you’ll never leave your husband, I remind myself that whales used to live on land, that they weren’t much bigger than dogs.
THAT’S WHY I’M HEADED TO GREECE
This is not the sky I would have chosen. The kitchen ran out of kokoretsi, and that tree doesn’t go with this shirt. I guess the women had somewhere else to be. I guess the moon doesn’t need directions. Come closer, I can’t read the fine print without my other glasses. Asclepius is still waiting for his rooster, and the sun has risen to scant applause. Farewell, indigo petunias. I’m off to the land of Socrates and all that that entails.
