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  • Black-Footed Country
  • Lindsay Wilson (bio)

I proposed fire as another form of growth the morning we woke to find the field of sage

and creosote replaced by wind-stoked smoke and burning bushes. My mother had recently passed,

so you thought I was speaking in metaphor, but I said I was speaking in world. That evening

the clouds wrung from our hopes appeared and rained the ash from the air, and I came back

to my mourning in this new black-footed country where I still couldn’t write that grief,

and yet I knew some dormant seeds need fire to grow. A goddamn metaphor, you said, What do you want?

The smell of creosote after a desert rain?Can’t have that, you said. They were all consumed.

So I wrote of the steam rising from the charcoal fields, and how lost I felt watching the returned-evacuated

children’s flashlights scatter across the ridgeline, and in between their shrieks of laughter I thought,

Where are their mothers to lead them home? [End Page 20]

Lindsay Wilson

Lindsay Wilson, an English professor in Reno, Nevada, has published four chapbooks, and he has poetry published in the Portland Review, Verse Daily, the South Dakota Review, Salamander, and Harpur Palate.

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