“Some Words for the Week”

Even after hundreds of years

of breeding and domestication

if you release a pig

back into the wild

in just two weeks

it will grow back its coarse hair

and tusks and get aggressive

in so few days

all our work to break nature

with our weapons and will

is as if it never happened

and so too does my house

fall back so easily into nothing

after a week away

the spiders have taken back

the ceilings and the sills

of the windows

the mold, that external stomach

of the natural world

has started on the food

in the refrigerator

and the snow drifts over

the front door

and the walls

so that it seems

the house is being eaten up

by the ground

we think so highly

of all this we’ve built

but in the span of no time really

all the wild we tried to hold back

by murdering all the

gods of nature

and those who built them altars

all this wild we tried to hold back

will come spilling over

this blooming land without us

Alexander Shalom Joseph is a writer from Gilpin County. He has two published books and one more forthcoming in the Fall of 2022. For more information and to subscribe to Alexander’s Newsletter go to alexandershalomjoseph.com