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C.N.P Poetry 

Writer's pictureCathexis Northwest Press

Open Space; Smoke

By: Evan Brown


Open Space


You were told it was healing to climb above the valley and glimpse the sun’s beginning, to feel the grass ignite and glare at you, and maybe even see the crude inter- ruptions amalgamate, tuck themselves away into other clefts of mountains. You had never been so close before to the atmosphere’s easy love-worn quilt. As the sun distanced itself from the edge, a world below unrolled. The quilt did not– don’t you dare leave that soft detainment. Sometimes as the light gathers, you can hear the arguments of beetles, clicking about when pseudoclouds of freezing jet fuel will take on real clouds’ repose; where the tarnished pennylike stacks from factory chimneys will spill; how the place we stand is wanted and seen as vital earth, some productive discharge in the name of convenience. All this candor is hard to walk back down from. You linger up there, flickering in sunrise like a pigeon’s plume, then you drift down to your own dissolution. You have to collect your gait, show your sober face again as you bring the ring back to the jeweler after she says no.







Smoke

How some of us carry on: quiet kindling consonants seeping under doors and staggering into rooms, feeling out the windows and walls only to vanish. The suggestion of your body once lay cast in a sheet, your main points plotted like a constellation: shoulder, elbow, hipbone, knee, ankle. So I let you smolder there awhile until the sounds of birds started from a wire. You struggled your way into a hoodie. Against window light, you were fundamental outlines of anatomy. Then your breath wept down a pane of glass and all I could do was face your hair, take it in my hands and get everything going in the right direction again.




 

Evan is a third year student at San Jose State University. He is studying to receive his BA in Technical/Professional writing. Evan enjoys reading and writing poetry whenever he can. He always aims to be true to what inspires him: namely, his home state of California, nature, and beauty in the mundane.



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