Fever at Watervliet

by Maureen Alsop

The strawberry sun vacillates between the noon smoke of paper mill factory towers and the blanched horizon of a midnight farm. An unrealized harvest is the action of drought. Sleepers, your role is sleep. The temperament of your bed, predawn, is the dull mix of ragweed & stone; your shoulders round toward sternum as sidelong your transparent ribs repeat a series of answers - a thin grain, a blossoming heat, the pent shapelessness of a cloud. The one small thresh of the circle. Your one good leg holding its weight.

6S

Maureen Alsop is a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.