Madeleine Cravens is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was a recipient of the Max Ritvo Poetry Fellowship. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in American Chordata, the Adroit Journal, the Kenyon Review, and Third Coast, among others.

ROAD TO BYBLOS by Madeleine Cravens

Mechanized time was an invention 
created to sustain 
entire empires.

And love, I knew, 
could be expressed 
through an idiom about graves. 

We rode past the beachside
nightclub and three
cement factories. 

I wasn’t in love. 
I never knew what time it was.

Smoke unfurled from the airbase.
A pregnant dog howled
from under a fig tree. 

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