Richard T. Rauch

Urban Micro-Archaeology

​As enthusiasm reigned,
it began to wane.
Old doubts arose anew,
insinuating
new vagaries into worn
fallacies, fresh rot
into each crevice
of every wooden fence built
to hedge against excuses
long dormant, now revived,
each cockeyed picket
straying from the line,
casting incongruities
over a city’s
mixed-modern menagerie:
a playground, for example,
where feral cats starve,
romping away their last days
caterwauling and scratching
through a kiddie-less milieu
of sandboxes gone,
at last, to scat, hard shit
cradled in wild paw prints
hard pressed into soft sand.

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Richard T. Rauch lives along Bayou Lacombe in southeast Louisiana. He is part of a tenacious team of NASA engineers and scientists dedicated to sending human explorers back to the moon and on to Mars, and maybe someday (preferably sooner rather than later), out beyond Mars, too! Rick’s poetry credits include: Burningword, Confrontation, Crack the Spine, decomP, Euphony, Grey
Sparrow, The Oxford American, Pembroke Magazine, Wild Violet, and the anthologies Love Notes (Vagabondage Press) and Down to the Dark River: Contemporary Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press).