Devil’s Icebox

by John A. Nieves

That chorus you can’t hear is a forest
of dangling        bodies seeing               the sound, seeing
the future as smaller                 wings thrumming,
the past as shutter        and release and flash-
bulb capture. To prevent       white nose, the humans
were walled       off and the cave        breath became
just for the natives. Its constant               fifty-one
degrees, its loving                        damp glistening
the karst. Oh what falls                            is waste, but not
the bodies, not              the forest. The hikers
can still peek   in. The signs still           point
down. The roots           search and find. The habit
of believing the sky is     above and the earth
is below has never      helped       us understand
the ground      we stand          on, has never taught
us what the dirt           takes. Listen, the silence
of this darker  night is not silence, it is            a city
of birth and shivering with                   the floor above,
with feet grasping skyward to find a little       sleep.


JOHN A. NIEVES has poems forthcoming or recently published in journals such as: North American Review, Copper Nickel, 32 Poems, American Literary Review and Southern Review. He won the Indiana Review Poetry Contest and his first book, Curio, won the Elixir Press Annual Poetry Award Judge’s Prize. He is associate professor of English at Salisbury University and an editor of The Shore Poetry. He received his M.A. from University of South Florida and his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.