I can’t take in enough— the fruity warmth ripe citrus honey vanilla and something I can’t quite place. This must be what the moon smells like. Invasive, the residents tell me. This sweetness? These roots that fix the nitrogen in the strip-mined earth? I lean closer to the curtainless window breathe in through the screen fragrancing the arch and ache of clustered yellow as though I too might take root. The four-lobed blooms windmilling me. I exhale so close to repair, my abdomen pressed toward my spine. Here, hammocked by a familiar longing, balm for a grief that does not leave me. What it must be like to stave off erosion, to belong, scented and persistent.
Sandra Fees graduated from Syracuse University’s creative writing program. Her work has been published in New Madrid, Quiddity, Sky Island Journal, and Calyx, among others, and she was a finalist in The Ekphrastic Review’s 2021 “Bird Watching” Contest. A former Poet Laureate in Berks County, Pennsylvania, she is the author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017).
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