- Olivia Brooks
- Oct 29
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 30
The Sinkhole
Bag after bag of dirt from the garden store
shoveled in yet it’s still there
as wide as it was the morning it appeared
in the backyard, as deep.
•
The next day: deeper, wider.
I need a flashlight to see down to where
it doglegs and goes on out of view.
It swallows the flat stone I dragged
overtop of it, then a trash can lid.
My little hound sniffs the lip
of the overturned wheelbarrow
until the wheelbarrow is devoured too.
I bring her inside, she whines at the door.
•
I call the town and they say: not
our hole, not our problem.
I ask if they remember the man in Florida
who was sleeping when a sinkhole opened
underneath his home, how the floor buckled
in, how they never recovered his body—
but the line has already gone silent.
•
I hang caution tape, a mistake.
Neighborhood gawkers line my fence
posing for selfies with the yawning cavity.
Their kids lob garbage into it.
A news van shows up and their story
about the sinkhole takes off online,
becomes a national interest—the sinkhole
a mascot everyone can adopt.
Real estate investors text me nonstop:
Are you looking to part with it?
•
Against my better judgement I mow the grass
but leave the edge of the sinkhole ragged
so as not to get too close
which lends it the destroyed
look of an impact crater
or an eruption, a bear trap, a shark’s jaw
unhinged, its fanning rows of blades. Later I break
a promise and drink alone. The usual unfolds.
In the yard, at the edge, in a bitter temper
I piss like a punctured hose, the sound
a copperhead in the leaves.
•
I dream that someone is the landlord
of the sinkhole and wake up rattled, clammy.
While I’m asleep a celebrity billionaire tweets
that he means to own the sinkhole, create
inside of it what he calls
an “excretory” technology.
•
The town calls back. I don’t answer.
••
I’ve begun to notice that
at night the sinkhole gives the impression
it’s communing with the moon
and that their exchange, a delicate
umbral language, has been coming into being
longer than I’ve been paying attention
and has little to do with me at all
except perhaps as a witness, and even then.
•
The other thing is
I’ve been remembering. Not remembering
exactly. And different from a dream—
My mother stands on the rocks
that slope from Barnegat lighthouse.
It’s sunset. She’s facing the bay,
which is smooth as a rosary bead
thumbed to a shine in a bedroom
papered with wild and fading horses.
Smooth and bright, the water the color
of a mountain on fire.
When my father shouts to her
from the railing of the walking path
above, she goes with him.
•
In time something shifts in me. A valve clicks.
I empty, a release like forgiveness. It is then
just life, my unlikely stewardship of the wonder
of the moment. Some nights I sit in the grass
in the yard under the glacial
bottomless turning of the sky, and try
to really listen, to be a part of it.
Try to.
•
My sweet hound sleeps by that door now.
She rests her velvet head on crossed paws
in a way that looks a lot to me like prayer.
FM STRINGER is from New Jersey. His poems can be found or are forthcoming in The Penn Review, Missouri Review, North American Review, EPOCH, and elsewhere. He lives in Pennsylvania with his wife and dogs.