“At Arcadia Dump, Later On” by Matthew Gwathmey
Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “At Arcadia Dump, Later On” by Matthew Gwathmey.
At Arcadia Dump, Later On
By Matthew Gwathmey
We meet a shepherd among a trail of discarded electronics, staff assembled out of PVC pipe. Impressive, his change from a parabola of methane to a camber of mercury, summing up the whole landfill season that stretched before us. When I started, he says, I had everything I needed in the cloud. The smell of sulphur caught in the art of natural selection—a breezy genetic drift. We watch a few beady-eyed sheep play off the dumping ground (darting noses, probing hooves against the slag heap edge, wool newly wet). Avian swimmers dodge steam-powered waves. Country folk dressed in hazmat suits search the undershow, snoop through garbage bags. At a yelp they huddle to marvel at a crunched statistic or a shiny zippo. The siren signals the next level of hide ye mouse and seek ye cat. Soon, the falling sky will be so close at hand.
Copyright © Matthew Gwathmey
First appeared in Poetry Pause on October 19, 2020. Previously published in Our Latest Folktales (Brick Books 2019).
Matthew Gwathmey lives in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on Wolastoqey Territory. He studied creative writing at the University of Virginia and recently completed his PhD at UNB. His second poetry collection, Tumbling for Amateurs, just came out with Coach House Books.
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