Nothing less natural than a tree-
lined block of the Bronx, the Inspector
tells me as my son and I stand
barefoot beneath the ruins of a great house
to the sundry urban wildlife I watched
throughout his infancy, ravaged
by apps that allowed me to track his lack
of starvation, his lack of sleep and mine.
It’s the salt and custom, the making way
for wires, that forces a kind of dysmorphia
on the tree, branching it against nature,
guaranteeing a split in midlife. The stress
of what good it can do is the same thing
that kills it, first by a crack—then rot, then
catastrophic failure to hold itself up.
My father is in the hospital again.
It is January and I am beginning to fear
the cyclic peril of this time. Simone Weil
says that a headache makes her want
to hit someone in the head, that old urge
to connect, even through our base desires.
When I was little my father started
my long apprenticeship. This is a fifty-year
maple. That is a century. When, next week,
the tree is gone, Éamon and I will pour
the water we boil on what’s left. When we count
the years the tree lived we will have been
only a moment for it. It will take no notice
of how many rings remain when we reach
my father’s age.

Meghan Maguire Dahn is the author of Domain (selected by Jennifer Chang for the Burnside Review Press Award, 2022) and the chapbook Lucid Animal (winner of the Harbor Review Editor’s Prize, 2021). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Boston Review, the Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Fence, Gettysburg Review, the Iowa Review, Lana Turner, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Northwest, among others. She was selected for the 2017 Best New American Poets anthology by Natalie Diaz and she was a winner of the 2014 Discovery/92^ndStreet Y Poetry Prize (judges: Rosanna Warren, Susan Mitchell, and John Ashbery). She has an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts, teaches at Fordham University, and lives in New York with her family.