Anne Dyer Stuart
Now in the country of lost dogs, smashed cats
Deer baked flat on the side of the road
Brittle last grass of winter
Husks of brown
Brown days and brown shoes and felt-tip pens and worry
Spring is a season of indomitable rage
If you’re young
If you feel young
If you feel sure you will feel young again
Now on the ribbon of black tar
Dazzle of bright orange warnings
Before the abandon of Easter’s tease
Before the sweet pained trill of a house finch
Whose sweetness makes you sad
And how little those birds are
In the yard in the air in the trees in the rafters
Of the back porch
With their insistent optimism
With their industry and might
Anne Dyer Stuart won New South journal’s 2012 prose prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in
Fiction Southeast, New
World Writing, Exit 7, Lake Effect, Pembroke Magazine, Poet
Lore, The Louisville Review, Third Coast, Best of the Web, storySouth, and elsewhere. She teaches at Bloomsburg University
in Pennsylvania.
Links to Anne Dyer's work online:
New World Writing, “Every Bad Thing”
Cleaver Magazine, “This Town is Your Town Too”
Midway Journal, “Ruined Ghazal”
r.kv.r.y., “Scars”
storySouth, “First Grade”
This poem appeared in Sakura IV.
