Laura Ring

MOVING BACKWARDS

When time started moving backwards,
the water we spilled on the ground
gathered up again.

Also, married daughters came home.
Startled babies got their souls back.
Even the wooden houses decided to grow.

We got angry, invented
ever more gruesome ends for matter:
phase change, electron transfer, oxidization.

Nothing stayed dead.

Hollow trees welled with sap.
Bronze shed its patina.
The blocks we knocked down reassembled
Indo-Saracenic fashion.

We were nostalgic for dirt,
the smell of ruin.
Old things that relinquish their grip.

And we knew, then,
the burden of the former gods—

not the making. The smiting:
the rise of the waters;
the terrible stretch of the hand.

Laura Ring is a native Vermonter living and working in Chicago. She writes poetry, fiction and non-fiction.  You can find some of her poems online in Juked, Blood Orange Review, and Qarrtsiluni, among other places.