by Cassandra Whitaker
In the upper gut of the forest rut
where black capped chickadees crest
and eye the pine break broken like a knee
as vines assume and assume the body
and rise up into air, the vine’s idea
brighter and brighter, the pine
forgetting all but it’s softest memories, moments
under the mother shade
of the great yellow pine that stands
twelve feet away. A fox jays
in from the east, bright tuft of hair
crowning up like a corvid, fur fuzzed up
from burrowing out from a maple fall
when farmer Ohan hunkered his tractor by
on the way to fleece the field
and keep straight what has never been straight
in long green memory. Beyond
the field, mother’s mother, the ocean, and beyond
the ocean, father farther, empty
of all thoughts, a blue so forever it pales.
Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia. Their work has been published in or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Hobart, The Little Patuxent Review, Foglifter, Evergreen Review, The Comstock Review, and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle.
Emerge Literary Journal 