Poetry:
Joshua
Young
from This Is the Way to Rule
Dear Survivors,
we come upon a party of women cutting through the gut of a forest. when they see us approaching, they scatter. we keep shouting, we mean no harm, but just as quickly as we came upon them, they’ve vanished. we can hear breaths and twigs snapping, but cannot see them. our shouts keep echoing, further and further into the trees.
Dear Survivors,
this was a diner where all the hipsters used to smoke their cigarettes and drink their coffee and think about the bands they had discovered. now it’s a shelter. the only dry place in town with a roof and fire hydrants outside. people cram themselves behind the glass and steel and watch the rain kill fires attempting to take what’s left. someone says, we didn’t need the hydrants after all. someone else laughs.
Joshua Young is the author of four collections, most recently, THE HOLY GHOST PEOPLE (Plays Inverse Press, 2014) and the chapbook Sedro-Woolley Days: A Damien Jurado Mixtape (Midnight City, 2015). He is Editor-in-Chief at The Lettered Streets Press and works at The University of Chicago. He lives in the Albany Park neighborhood with two humans.
Photo credit: pippalou, morguefile.com
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