(Andreas Vendelbo/Unsplash)

SEASONAL

All lemon-lime, and caught

in the curb, ginkgo wings mind thin spines,

brightly pathetic.

If they move, they move with whip-wind obligation,

then resume a heaviness. If they fly, they fly

from boot tread, briefly.



For weeks now, trees have heaved freight

overboard—pods and cones

and the final, reluctant prophets. Like a tick,

I couch in disconsolation.

Somewhere a river birch is resolutely flayed alive.

Shed your self-pity. I sleep to survive.

 

JEFFERSON COMMONS

I.

Cars languish in their daily stations

when a cool front rolls into the parking lot.

A strict row of balding maples

separates commerce from subdivision

above the runoff drainage ditch,

which waits like a big bird’s lower beak

for a drink. Heavy clouds, then

downpour, anxious to settle

fast, sluice and gutterspew glazing over itself

down the grade to the tilted bill.

But its gullet is blocked, leaf-infested.

Days: and the rain stops.



II.

Sun on Monday. I come with my rake.

Arduously, seepage had inched

from the drain’s brim through clotted

humus at its PVC esophagus. Now

the bright yellow film which remained

festers in freak ninety-degree heat. I scrape

the septic surface open to its chocolate

underbelly, stench and a spirit

of skeeters lift, released. Brooding air

seems like an extension of me,

as I stuff globs into large paper bags.

Breaking from the wet weight.

Josiah Cox currently serves as a junior lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. His work is forthcoming or has appeared in Bad Lilies, Christianity and Literature, Ekstasis magazine, the North American Anglican Poet’s Corner, the Blue Mountain Review, and elsewhere. He is from Kansas City, Missouri.

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