NELS HANSON

Migration

In a bad dream I saw the long line of elephants
walking slowly toward their graveyard filled with
skulls and ivory. Tigers shrugged off their black stripes

and completely orange dissolved into sunset. Snowy egrets
beat high enough to peck at the locked doors of clouds
and owls flew faster around the globe so day was always

night. A million hatches shut and those who burrow
entered forever the kingdoms of the blind. Then I
reached an empty city, not a soul, just occasional

graffiti that said Goodbye. In one abandoned building
I searched each story, each room deserted, on the wall
a broken mirror, reflections run away. In the sky

above a tower one last jet reared back and rocketed
straight up, for the daylight moon that broke its orbit
to retreat. Under the sea the fish discovered a secret

tunnel to the center of the Earth. Everything tried to
escape, every species a refugee, racing toward a sanctuary
from what was once their sanctuary, the alarm spreading —

Now even meteors who scientists say first brought water
and perhaps life to our planet reversed, their white trails
like fallen angels rising, shooting into farthest space.

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Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California and has worked as a farmer, teacher and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award and Pushcart nominations in 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2016. His poems received a 2014 Pushcart nomination, Sharkpack Review’s 2014 Prospero Prize, and 2015 and 2016 Best of the Net nominations.