We small-town dead crabgrass over the cracked blue
walls of the grange, where the post-mistress delivers
dead letters beaming with flora of flourishing lands
in the upper-right corner. Our young always meant
to go there, those parks and strip malls outstretched
beyond the frames our portraits wilt inside. If only
vo-ag folk knew crops the way nanas knew suffering,
that perfect loam for planting here. The cows gave
up their loyalty and slunk off like strangers with correct
tools and no addresses, who know only rest but not
stay. Across hills and flats, hope falls, rusts through.
Last link of chicken-coop mesh rots down to red
metal sunk for the bridge Screak River stalls
under, chokes in rock and slough of russet sediment
clear down to shack-farms’ dust, where the frayed
sun plunges too late to call for rescue. The town sidles
wide, arachnid gut spun dry of all work but retreat:
that erosion-laden air salts every storefront, pocks
every road—even the granite that mimes our names.
Alexandra Burack is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, editor, and author of On the Verge (Plinth Books). Her recent work appears in The Sewanee Review, Broad River Review, The Blue Mountain Review, Roi Fainéant, ORLANDO, Ink & Marrow, $ Poetry Is Currency, and FreezeRay Poetry, and is forthcoming in Spillway Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and Lumina Journal. She is a 2024 Artist Opportunity Grant recipient (AZ Commission on the Arts), and an Artist Fellow in Poetry (CT Commission on the Arts). She serves as AZ Master Teacher/Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at Chandler-Gilbert Community College (AZ), and as a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review.
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