High in the Sierra
green summer aspen
whisper to the lake.
The snowpack glitters.
Over the passes
Winnebago thunder
out of the wide red flats of Nevada.
Huge crooked knuckles,
the dark screes loom.
Deep in the roadbeds,
the bones of the Irish
& Chinese workers
whose lives were pitted
against one another
to drive down & down
the price of their labor
—who shattered their bodies
dynamiting these crossings—
blaze in their graves.
From Rift Zone by Tess Taylor, forthcoming from Red Hen Press.
Tess Taylor is the author of the chapbook The Misremembered World, selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship; The Forage House, which was a finalist for the Believer poetry prize; and Work & Days, which was named one of the best books of poetry of 2016 by the New York Times. Ilya Kaminsky recently hailed her as “the poet for our moment.” In spring 2020 she published two books of poems: Last West, part of the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures at the New York Museum of Modern Art, and Rift Zone, from Red Hen Press. She is a poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered.
