Rachel Galvin
Elevated Threat Level Sonnet
Forty geese flock and dispel across the page.
They say there is an order to the distribution
of headlights on the Beltway. We bow
to choreography, dozens of feet
marching and halting in sync
down a broken metro escalator.
If you place your ear on the sand,
the systolic-diastolic rhythm of infinite cells
each opening and closing its one mouth
says we are marked like Cain, and when the train
halts in a tunnel, you see your own falter
in the eyes of a woman you don’t know,
just as two cells from the same heart,
reunited in a petri dish, beat in time.
Rachel Galvin’s books include Pulleys & Locomotion and a translation of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, which won the Scott Moncrieff Prize. Elevated Threat Level will be published by Green Lantern Press in 2017, and a translation of Oliverio Girondo (with Harris Feinsod) is forthcoming from Open Letter Books. She is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago.