Anniversary by Max McDonough via Columbia Poetry Review

Tonight a storm scrambles the clocks
and I’m sixteen again on the bank of the Tuckahoe,
throwing rocks into the starless water

while Doug, still alive, rummages the construction site
for things to set on fire—soiled rag, concert flyer,
bird’s nest flung in the scrub-reeds. Soon he’s

found something new under the bucket loader,
but his yelling blends with the tire sounds
funneled down like shell-echoes

from the highway overpass behind us. I sink
another rock as he comes closer, corpse
of a bird dangling from his unsmashed hand,

a highbeam’s yellow wash across his face a moment
before it flees the unburned
skin. He says hold it for me

pulling the lighter out of his right jean pocket
with the thumb and knuckle that bend
when he spins the striker, and the wing of the bird

I can’t save, already dead, can’t
douse in black river water, catches—
and we watch flame climb the feather-tips

into the hollow quills, where the air,
trapped, has nowhere left to go.