Three Poems by Katie Bowler Young (Poetry ’07)

On a Search for Something to Spoil

Grinding, polishing, fusing. Setting seams again
like a metalworker in the dream, underwater,
fixated on the line where ocean meets air.

Salt rushes into freshwater, as though
to be brackish is to be neutral, a blend
of worlds where to be one or the other

is to try to keep water where it belongs,
as though we could engineer our way
out of floods. What madness. I’m mad—