By Justin Rigamonti

I stop to gawk at a burned-out trailer—
kinda pretty. One of the guys behind it
taps his ear, asks, Are those nice?
They’re old, I say, lifting an earpiece.
Speaking of nice, the other guy says,
That bike is only twenty bucks. It’s pink
with tassels on the handlebars, and it’s
probably stolen. He must think I’ve got
a couple kids at home, but no, it’s two
chihuahuas, so I’m not interested. Instead,
I skirt a stand of poplars with laundry
hanging from the lower branches, a catalogue
of dirty magazines beneath. Three pit bulls
barking poetry behind a chain-link fence.
A tall dining chair in its Sunday best:
a red McDonald’s T-shirt. It’s like shopping
for moments down here. Because all of this
will vanish soon—everything, yes, but also
these woods and three feet of topsoil,
excised and hauled off to god knows where.
For now, a poisoned cluster of madrones
coughs up a guy who looks like me,
also wearing headphones, also browsing.
You teach at the college, he says, like it’s
not a question. I took a class with you ten
years ago, he says, and I don’t respond.
Because how is this still happening?
Life, I mean. Above us, a row of tan condos
lean out over the superfund riverbank
where hawks pluck salmon with gills the color
of benzopyrene, scrawls of green and pink
graffiti across the concrete pediments.
I want to offer him something, a shred
of hard-won middle-aged bullshit.
But he beats me to it: Life is strange,
he says, smiling. Which is true and I
finally answer: Compared to what?

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Justin Rigamonti teaches English at Portland Community College and serves as the Poetry Coordinator for Chatter PDX. His poems have been recently published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Rattle. His poem “Failure” was selected to appear in Best New Poets 2025.