Wells

by Chris Dungey

Meandering through

a trash-blown forty acres,

overgrown until all the neighbors

have come to think of it as our private

deer preserve—one morning appear

the muddy bulldozer scrapings

of a new street. Within days concrete

curb-forms sprout; utility

boxes; four foundation holes;

the brown, sandy heaps trucked near

for engineered septic. Late into evenings,

so late in the year, muttering generators

illuminate roughed-in frames

with the phosphorus-white light of star

shells. Sporadic nail-gun salvos clatter

A carbide auger bit pounds as if dropped

from a siege tower, to core a path

for the well-point, the submersible

pump. First drinks and baths, loads

of laundry drawn forth from seeping clay

and shale gush over scarred topsoil

that should be already frozen.

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Chris Dungey is a retired auto worker in MI. He rides mountain bike to battle his f.u.p.a. and a Honda scooter for the planet. He follows Detroit City FC and Flint City Bucks FC with religious fervor. More than 180 of Dungey’s poems have found publication in litmags and online; most recently in Thimble Literary and forthcoming in Abraxas.

"Wells" is his first appearance in The Itch.