A dog’s grave: mound of concrete
with a cross pressed in.
We are full-on sinful,
unbuttoning our Levi’s,

crouched behind a slash pile
in the Rathbone’s woods.
Scott pisses on it first,
then Harris, Owen, me. Steam fountains up

and forms sastrugi, greeting our faces
like sheer tongues,
like the dead who cannot bring
themselves to tell us, what you’ve feared is true.

None of us wonders
if there’s something worse
than Judgment: the years we’ll spend unmarried

to any home, praying in Potosi, Fayetteville, Batavia,
afraid that God
won’t care, afraid he will.

The worst thing we can think of, we’ve done,

then we walk home, grateful that the streetlights float
on darkness, indifferent as distant boats.