POACHERS
I walk through a dark car park
past the sleeping cars
toward the dumpster enclosure, bathed in light.
From its depths comes a faint crying:
reborn as a gray trash can,
an elephant misses its mother.
GIFT
My childhood was unique due to a secret:
Santa Claus lived next door.
He wore no St. Nick vestments,
but his house was stuffed with toasters, computers,
phones, electric mixers, and odd
unlabeled cardboard boxes
from which came audible crying.
So when dad once handed mom one of them,
I ran headfirst into my room and began to cry
to cover up the crying from the box.
But it only contained a new sewing machine,
which mom would use to sew new limbs for my sister
and fix her nearly detached head.
Teemu Helle is the author of seven collections of poetry in Finland; work in translation can be found in Modern Poetry in Translation, EuropeNow, and Vittles.
