In language as beautiful as it is forboding, Margo Taft Stever’s poems call to us from the dream just before apocalypse, a dream filled with caged animals, caged people, all manner of the ones gone, or soon to go missing.

Instructions for Burial

Dress her in blood stone and
azure silk from Le Printemps.
Let blue springs envelope her.
Let her grow roots—a tree,
pulling water from earth

to bough, branches
training leaves; each
season—each separate 
body—each universe smaller—
explained and recanted.

On the evening news, scientists 
gather wearing masks; it is not
Halloween. Each holds
a variant explanation.