Endgame
—Dear father I know you are happy now
I cannot find you in the ether—just the notice of your dying—
not even nuclear in its resonance—not even one
bad photo clouding over one blue sky // & so I wander
transparent streets w/old world screenshots (one) sad wet eyes—
yours—above a ventilator // no voice in that other time //
analog abyss // (two) the wrecked mechanical heaving
of your lungs so you were bone & pump & a length of hose
above my tentative hand // & then the untethering
(to save you they said)—& then the choking (you were alone)
the dying //—it is cold here now // immense fortunes
are moving through us like oceans that don’t quite
condense // just rain & a little mud in the yard the tulips
dagger through // —O tulips // joyful fearful tulips // the woman
across the street is 93 & still alive—I am obliged—& needs
some groceries—I am obliged—until the task’s fulfilled & this
day in the looming string of days foreclosed

Dennis Hinrichsen lives in Lansing, Michigan and is the author of eight books of poetry and three chapbooks. His most recent work is This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the 2020 Grid Poetry Prize, and [q / lear] from Green Linden Press. He has new work in The American Journal of Poetry, American Poetry Journal, Canary, MacQueen’s Quinterly, The Maine Review , and Triggerfish Critical Review, and forthcoming in Under a Warm Green Linden. From May 2017 – April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing Area.