Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2010

Variation on a Landscape  
Keith Montesano

After Joel Sternfeld’s Photograph: After A Flash Flood, Rancho Mirage, California, 1979

This has to be a painting: composed driveway,
thin black line in tight, delicate strokes, separating

the plane, the earth from itself in this fabricated,

half-city fever dream, in this afterworld two-piece puzzle,
showing children what used to be, directions

reading: Cut the dark middle line from right to left, and when

you get to the small bushes, keep cutting until the end.
With no fence or guardrail, how did someone drunk

not shift to reverse and careen down the gorge, what’s left

of this former backyard? It was easy. They watched
the water from the garage: torrents of rain swirling,

dead trees uprooted and floating to who-knows-where.

But they didn’t see the car, didn’t know as they watched 
that someone was there: tucked into a ball

in the front seat, the only shelter they could find.

 

Keith Montesano is the author of the poetry collection Ghost Lights (Dream Horse Press, 2010). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, American Literary Review, Third Coast, Blackbird, Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in New York, where he is a PhD Candidate in English and Creative Writing at Binghamton University.