A journal of art + literature engaging with nature, culture, the environment & ecology

July

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.

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How Lucky I Am