[like campfires on a dark]

by Dan Alter

Luke Porter

Like campfires on a dark hillside, furling heat faded but I have their names I shouldn’t say, M, D in a bed dragged into trees, vague musty guest room, N for an hour upstairs, R a doorway, flares pointing to where the plane would land. World

melts to body, K on floor-tiles, a bare mattress with Y near the sea, was it night, it was, their names touching down, taxiing. Body all tongues, doubled breaths, unearthly. A bunk bed L, V on her couch, what did I understand kissing in the dark

& the dark undulating like kelp. You the longest kiss in a truck cab on the third date that turned into this. Down a musty dull-carpeted hallway M over me victorious like she’d risen from waves. A sky, until the next day, unfolds in my cardboard box life. Forty

years later, the runaway metabolism propels from her ovaries & she’s dead in her bed in Amsterdam where I have never been.

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Dan Alter has published poems and translations widely in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva. His collection, My Little Book of Exiles, Eyewear Press, won the poetry prize for the 2022 Cowan Writer’s Awards. Take a Breath, You’re Getting Excited, a volume of translations, comes out from Ben Yehuda in the fall of 2024, and Hills Full of Holes, his second collection, will be published by Fernwood Press in 2025. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and daughter. www.danalter.net