by Daniel Simonds
Before the sagebrush goes from red to gray in the spring, before its green, I think of ways to renew—the trail cam showed the trustees that our unleashed dog had more spirit than us—I saw the matted grass where the deer slept huddled and I knew I had to cuddle her more—if you pick the pearly everlastings and pink yarrows they might not grow the same next year; so I woke up the sleepy barn owl, I checked for its copious pellets and vole bones below its home, knocked and knew we’d savor its flight, for which she only scolded me: “You hate when someone wakes you up”; you see, she only wears her Rolex in between the seasons—I hear its ticking when her wrist holds my eardrum in the dune grass; yet time is an eel in its trap in the creeks, a Gartner snake in a glue trap, its muscles contracting; I can’t figure out why those mud minnows can’t figure out how to swim out of their own silver; I went to the trap house and fifteen minutes there almost finished me—smoking a cigarette only for its ash for the crack pipe, tinfoil pinched between forefinger and thumb like a rodent’s pocked skull; suddenly atop the hill on Cherry St., a rescued lesser black-backed gull waits in my trunk for release into the peat, barbed hooks removed from in its beak; aerosols and a blow torch are lighting the feathergrass after dark at low tide, the only place to go without chores, moonlight, where people won’t drive for fear of getting stuck in the sand, when you are never stuck if you dig.
Daniel Simonds is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
Emerge Literary Journal 