Meadow oak arrives first, soaks up sun
with low-lying branches. Shade-tolerant
maples follow, reach higher to find the light.
Their cooperation allows a mixed forest.
Mountain ash emerges from fallen willow,
offers the riverside peace and protection
Vespers lie across the floor
Perched on dark mouths
That have emerged from the
Nearby church. Angels
With broken wings have fallen
With delicate, pale feet
Dipped in cold misery onto
The earth. The door has averted
Itself so the landscape
No longer strains its view. The
Church paints over the
Stained glass windows. The vespers fly
Out of windows. The red lips curl into
* poem, in its entirety, is available in the printed version of the current issue.
Bio:
The life Queenslanders have led with relatively few and unobtrusive restrictions will now end and be replaced by an emerging global order that hives off the vaccinated from the unvaccinated and accepts large caseloads as the price of doing business but knows not what will come of recent surges from the UK to Germany to Singapore and the drumbeat of numbers keeping steady time in the United States.
Fall is a time for the nostalgia that so often grows out of our memories of school. It was in late October 1985, at Mitchell High School in Bakersville, North Carolina, that I decided to win.
Flurries swirled in the stadium lights. The temperature hovered around freezing, but I was not the least bit cold standing at the starting line in my white singlet and blue shorts with two good-luck wheat pennies rolled into the top of my left sock waiting for the gun to go off …
Goats were sedated … before being put into harnesses
as part of the goat relocation program.
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