Justin Runge
Ed. note: These three poems come from a sequence called In the Orchard.
25
back against ditch bank
she watches a burning
brown what’s distant
appears to be approaching
apocalypse cloudy
all this casual violence
in the rendering hair
parted a brittle wreath
surroundings no more
than spackle scrape across
fire damage her sleeve
though as wet as illness
he keeps the grotesque
sunset the terrible light
turned away she joins
my looking a spectator too
yes an audience forms
one large and close aloneness
26
were there ambitions
for the blank above to bear
sky is it truth I look up to
be reduced most people do
like a voyager he leaves
to look back at her smaller
disembodied perhaps
a ghost only needs to keep
what will be recognized
to emit some light
for the witness fog lifts
and there’s the militia
spectral whistling
distracting the dairy farmers
the orchard voided she
is a coin’s relief on clean
paper sculpture surfacing
from milk indigenous
27
she is the interruption
of a signal neural
snarl a child who
doesn’t understand pencil
holds one and makes it
function rupturing
the beginning body this
is fable not journal-
ism the story given
by habit to any lost thing
who is missing it now
home checking pockets
her head a bauble
found on the forest floor
then brought by his beak
to be nested I promise
not to spend too much
time here looking