Carl Boon
The Dead

They are the color of pine,
the trucks that carry the dead
across Turkey.
Open to weather,
the oblong boxes strapped in
lift slightly with the wind,
the new road between Izmir
and the sea ridged with winter’s rain.
The dead within know no change,
no season. Two women 
in a place called Beautiful Garden
pause in their picking of apricots
as a truck veers past. One raises
a hand to her scarf; the other
shields her eyes as if it were the sun,
not the terribly ordinary 
there to remind us how it’ll be—
the last journey through,
the distant schoolyard emptying,
the minarets gleaming green,
and flocks of crows bemused
by our tiresome practices.

Carl Boon lives and works in Izmir, Turkey. His poems appear in dozens of magazines, most recently Two Peach, Jet Fuel Review, Blast Furnace, and Poetry Quarterly.