Scott Wiggerman
Aftershocks
a golden shovel including a Dickinson last line (#799)
From some dark cavity, an affliction,
long-brooding, surfaces across America. It feels
like a brass-knuckled fist. What was impalpable
and buried has flared up and spread until
the ache of anguish is unbearable—ourselves,
our loved ones, in shrink-wrapped panic. How are
we to rise from chaos once unleashed and struck?
Scott Wiggerman is the author of three books of poetry, Leaf and Beak: Sonnets, Presence, and Vegetables and Other Relationships; and the editor of several volumes, including Wingbeats: Exercises & Practice in Poetry, Lifting the Sky: Southwestern Haiku & Haiga, and Bearing the Mask. Recent poems have appeared in A Quiet Courage, Naugatuck River Review, Red Earth Review, Rat’s Ass Review, shuf, Yellow Chair Review, and others. He lives with his husband, the writer David Meischen, in Albuquerque, NM.