although the nation is done for, /I find new flowers. Donald Revell
i.
my husband tells me fireflies are dying out on the hill.
He asks, Do you remember
how they lit up the woods?
Yes, but I haven’t noticed the new dark in the trees,
I’m distracted by bomb-blown curtains
Some folks’ certainty
In the darkness, one ignition
among the dogwood, a long pause, then
another
Now you see them, now you don’t.
ii
I settle back absorbed in To Kill a Mockingbird
before the library takes it off the shelves.
Outside, the birds mock our attempts
to silence them
iii
after Carroll County Electric comes by
with its prehistoric-looking cutter
and lops the big trees back, I pretend
nothing has changed,
that I love the scraggle of trees, clinging
onto the verges. My choice was cutting
or poisoning the hillside. I say, what else
could I have done?
iv.
Oh, Lord, keep me from making excuses,
from describing the spring’s bluets and field iris,
as if they could be my explanation
for standing back?
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 2.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of three books and five chapbooks. Her most recent full-length book is The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019.) Her work has appeared widely in journals, most recently in Attached to the Living World, an Ecopoetry Anthology (2025).
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