Invasive Species
I moved Manhattan aside with my hands
I moved its chessboard of avenues and streets
moved from a metropolis
to less ocean, more trees
Around me I placed a stone house
There I moved the species that didn’t belong
with my hands
I cut them once
then let them grow again, cut them down
to the roots and drowned them
There, I moved the invasion
into my body, swallowing
phragmites, flowering
rushes, Japanese sedge and Cypress Surge, their beauty
bittersweet and milk toxic, I swallowed
slender cotton snake
even yellow daffodils even red iris
because they too didn’t belong
This morning, across the opening
of our driveway, a deer
dead less than an hour
his furred antlers loose
his body still warm
I moved the car, rented a van
moved from a city to acres of black oak and beech
but I don’t belong
any more than the barberry and buckthorn
My strangeness as unsalvageable
as the herd
on the other side of this wall
that will, at a single sound, run full tilt
into oncoming headlights
Their terror is both key and the keyhole
I am not fit to be either
I choke on the deer, the willow
and the white dogwoods shadowing him
I try to be quiet when moving
SARAH WETZEL is the author of three poetry collections, most recently The Davids Inside David, from Terrapin Books. Sarah is Publisher and Editor at Saturnalia Books, and when not shuttling between her two geographic loves—Rome, Italy and New York City—she is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature in the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. She is trying to spend less time on planes.