Whose idea was it to uproot the old gum trees
             and replant with fifty-two Mexican fan palms,
one for every week of the galloping year?
             Why fell those trees full of singing birds
that for near a century, serenaded fortune hunters
             parked by the bay, waves crashing into Fleming Point?
The racetrack a ghost town now,
             green stalls and bunk houses stand vacant.
Track, grandstand, and clubhouse silent.
             No Winners Circle, no hay deliveries;
a thousand horses and their caretakers gone.
             Whose idea to ram unwatered palms
into hard-packed dirt— like cast-off racehorses—
             then pull up stakes the next day, clearing out
to the sound of sere fronds rattling in the wind?

From Berkeley, CA, Kathryn Jordan’s poems have placed or won Honorable Mention in the Steve Kowit, Muriel Craft Bailey, Connecticut River Poetry, and Patricia Dobler poetry prizes. Winner of the San Miguel de Allende Poetry Prize, her work appears in The Sun Magazine, Comstock Review, New Ohio Review and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. She loves hiking the East Bay Hills in search of the varied thrush, a bird that sings two notes on one breath.