Andrew Vogel, rural eastern Pennsylvania, USA
Thunderheads pile silence beyond the leafy horizon.
The fork-tail swallows jet the fields for dizzied bugs.
The cats too know better than us; they find themselves
stone-cool shadows and groom their appetites taut.
We falter out from parched-moss maple shade and
maunder the thatched rows of our weedy garden,
seasoning the grain of our skin with our own salts,
gathering a rime of black dust to our ankles and toes.
A whiff of mint breasting wilted eddies hints rain.
When it does come, cutting the air, draining to aquifer,
evaporating to sky, it will tutor these stunned seedlings.
We stay here and wait out this heat like fledgling birds
anxious to discover the trim of our bodies by falling.
Andrew Vogel walks the hills and teaches in rural Eastern Pennsylvania. His poems have appeared in The Blue Collar Review, Off the Coast, Slant Poetry Journal, The Evergreen Review, Hunger Mountain, Tule Review, The Briar Cliff Review and elsewhere.