While the hawk preys
In heavy March,
railroad tracks and rural routes
cut Ohio deep—
frozen, empty
fields of soy and corn
sectioned off into a measured grid,
tracks and roads, straight and slim
like stitches closing
the white world, waiting.
This is not sweet June’s
patchwork quilt,
not a honeysuckle breeze,
this is cars and trucks,
telephone lines,
the sick bite of sunlight
gasping, setting low
beneath the cloud bank and you,
stopped at a train a mile long, waiting and waiting and waiting.
*
Vic Nogay (she/her) is a Pushcart Prize- and Best Microfiction-nominated poet and writer whose work appears in Fractured Lit, Barren Magazine, and Lost Balloon, among others. Her micro chapbook of poems, “under fire under water” was published in 2022 by tiny wren publishing. She is an Associate Poetry Editor for Identity Theory and lives in Columbus, Ohio. Find her online at vicnogay.com
