YES NO YES This dust must have been something once. A man, a cactus, a horse. Ground shadowed by clouds. What's hidden stays hidden. It will be a cold rain. Manifest, certain, soaking. Thunder. Dust into mud. FIRST VERSES The earliest written documents were lists. Dean says we can't know if they're bills of sale or poems, which begs the question. My grocery list reads like verse: eggs, spinach, juice. But so does the sign at the end of your street: BLIND CHILD AT PLAY. Beautiful and useful. I always feared we would have to choose. Sunrise and sunset tell lovely lies, which is why their flat-Earth logic still shines across poetry's sky. But don't we write lines to seek new light, to clear the air? To find soft, fertile dirt and plant there. To order the chaos in rows. To blink. To think or stop thinking. To cope with how thoughts run: When the body's tired, the mind decides to rearrange the furniture and hum.
Laura M.
Dixon is a Michener Fellow in poetry at The University of Texas at Austin,
where she also serves as Associate Editor of Bat City Review.She
has received residencies from the Hambidge Center and the Woodstock Byrdcliffe
Guild.Her work has appeared
recently or is forthcoming in Wicked Alice, Front Porch, Apparatus
Magazine, Exact Change Only, and Georgetown Review.
