Poems by Genevieve Pfeiffer

Phragmites

by Genevieve Pfeiffer

From Canary Fall 2023

Genevieve is a PhD student in English with a focus in the ecohumanities at University of Oregon, located on Kalapuya Ilihi, the traditional indigenous homeland of the Kalapuya people. Having recently moved to the West Coast, they're happily hiking in the mountains, running trails, and cycling along the coast.

I can’t stop thinking about what you said the other day
about a man—or a woman—someone—in Auschwitz, who wrote a letter
how you couldn’t remember the whole thing, only a line:
if I never make it out of here, know that ________ existed.

Except you can’t remember their name, and I can’t find it online
but found plenty of photos of men who wear 6MWE T-shirts,
on each shirt an eagle grips a bundle of sticks around an axe
in its incredible, undiscerning talons.

And as I drive I think of the sweatshirt that read work brings freedom,
how my father worked from six in the morning to ten at night
and taught me how to use an axe to chop firewood. How they turned
the yellow and black of the bee that drinks nectar, pollinates and scatters life,
how they made those colors hateful.

I’m here on the interstate, in the setting sunlight that slants at just the right angle
and slides through the tufted tips of golden grass. White droplets of grain
catch in the yellow glow of the dead reed. And I don’t know the plant’s name either,
or whether it will survive this latitude in fifty years. Oh, I think. I’m so sorry—
I don’t know your name.