Edgelands
I approach our sour suburbs and flooded cornfields by train
and sweeten with gray winter
and wash myself in pine branches and goose wings picked
from the dirt like fragile fruit
I hear home ringing through this cold place and travel
another sundown dressing the frozen mud red
to stand blushing before a cul-de-sac of hostile admirers
and ponder whether it is lonely that I feel queerer crossing
the earth alone than in a pilgrim’s pair or trio
This crowded wilderness welcomes me with chapped dirt
and I arrive like two angels departing the Ravenous City decked
in velvet gowns, desirers’ handprints weighing down pristine wings, sashaying, momentarily,
the stones clean of misery,
The Oracle Emerges from the Water Tower
for J.F.V.
It wasn’t a garden.
We buried plastic figures there, in the trashy berm,
made offerings of cat turds from the sandbox,
counted on the deer to pin dusk to earth.
We fell in love with every ant and harvestman beneath the rotting boards.
The fleeting, the illusory-old, what grows, in time, in cracks.
The moss sprawled verdant glaciers beneath the thirty-foot maple.
We hid with other pupae in hillscapes of leaves and yard cuttings, biding our time before metamorphosis.
The angels at the gate? Trashmen, on Fridays, black vultures.
And the light of Autumn: a susurrus, choir.
— C. Rees (they/him) is a queer Pennsylvania-born eco-poet, writer, cultural worker, and New Writers Project alumnus living in Austin, TX. Their work excavates hauntings and landscapes, contamination and complicity, notions of emergence and knots of hybridity. You can read some of that work in Territory, Bat City Review, APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL, the Bellingham Review, Grimoire Magazine, and elsewhere. Recently their poem “Crossing” was chosen for the Poetry Society of America for the 2024 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award, and they were lucky to have spent time at Willapa Bay in May 2024. Further reading: https://linktr.ee/c.rees.