Site

A fenced-in square of sand and yellow grass,

five miles or more from the nearest town,

is the site where the County Poor Farm stood

for seventy years, and here the County

permitted the poor to garden, permitted them

use of the County water from a hand-pump,

lent them buckets to carry it spilling

over the grass to the sandy, burning furrows

that drank it away — a kind of Workfare

from 1900. At night, each family slept

on the floor of one room in a boxy house

that the County put up and permitted them

use of. It stood here somewhere, door

facing the road. And somewhere under this grass

lie the dead in the County’s unmarked graves,

each body buried with a mason jar in which

each person’s name is written on a paper.

The County provided the paper and the jars.