Dawn Dupler

Hilltop Cemetery

If you squint just right, you can see how the markers
have begun to slide from their graves. Unmoored. Unlevel.

One day the dead will slip down this hillside, our ancestors
tumbling out of caskets like coal from buckets our fathers

use at the mine. Hear the metal teeth dragging rock
as it scoops out farms. All those broken pastures. Blackened

and burnished seams. Always dust left for the body. Dust
that pools in the eyes. Pounds down the throat, smothers the lungs.

This entire town shifts sideways with each blast. Folds
back in on itself. Surrenders these long-hollowed hills again.

Our grandmothers’ stout bodies slope away from uneven lines
of hanging laundry. They beg their young to leave the county.

Before their hilltop markers are reset, and their descent begins again.

Dawn Dupler’s poetry has been featured on the buses and trains of St. Louis’s MetroLink and in journals such as Natural Bridge, Whiskey Island, Moon City Review, and others. She is the 2023 Grand Prize Winner of MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt and a 2023 Semifinalist for the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. Dawn has an MFA in Writing and a BS in Chemical Engineering. Retiring early from corporate life, Dawn now teaches Composition, Poetry, and Creative Writing at the St Louis Community College and works as an Associate Editor of december literary journal.