We Call Them Beautiful
Rent from DeepDyve- We Call Them Beautiful
We have decided to love trees. The living ones are corralled along the sidewalks in cities. The dying ones, once glorious, collapsed into dust from not being seen. Those in forests wave their hair and hands whenever the wind blows.
When he runs the track, they are behind him and all around the park.
Against the grey sky, they are like nerves pulled from the body, waving, sucking air, sucking dirt.
He starts clean but comes around the seventh time sweating, soaking his shirt through, giving me a little wave for my whistle.
A sliver of Einstein’s brain blown up under the microscope shows all the branches of where his thoughts went. Still waving.
Around the track the trees wave through the grey afternoon sky, like mute women trying to alert me to an emergency. [End Page 97]
KC Trommer is the author of the chapbook The Hasp Tongue (dancing girl p). She has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize, as well as fellowships from the Table 4 Writers Foundation, Center for Book Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, and Prague Summer Program. Her poems have appeared in AGNI Online, Antioch Review, Octopus, Sycamore Review, and a number of other journals. She lives in Jackson Heights, Queens, with her family.
