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we call cedar trees dying limbs


   


To decay; to rivers where rock bass feed on the underside of leaves. We are stoned injecting dirt into our arteries and eyes. We are reminded of another narrative, new free blooming vigor, big stems but free from can-crushing soul sucking work & in this thought, you notice a potted flower cluster together. We wrote vows in the living room while corporations burned the backyard. Thistles of fence posts driven into your hands like the first time I saw a rose beetle chewing caves in a maple. Frozen over springs fill the ditch. What molds simply clings to the solid left: the temporariness of myth becoming an artistic pattern mixed with lymph nodes, the swelling stress of money & tunnels in the mountains we pissed on without regard. We can see through them now simply by crossing over the trespass line. We think what would a day of sunshine be but a creeping fig? What would the darkness be but some city down I-40? Each thought produces a pattern more vigorous than rain. This is home, we notice, bundled tight in a truck bed. There are growing annuals and chainsaws, windows as open as a mud stain, and the sun is only a shape.




Evan Gray is from Jefferson, North Carolina. He is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Blindspot (the Rest (Garden-Door Press 2017); Body Birth (Above/Ground Press, 2019); Dusk Melody (Shirt-Pocket Press 2019). His essays and work have been featured in Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, and others. Currently, he is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Appalachian State University.