BY MK STURDEVANT

37.4667° N, 106.9789° W

Grafted husks of charcoal

stripped shafts blackened

dense particulate

rides the steam.

Aeries in the highest tops

are speared, shorn

exposed and empty.

One loose twig

beats the air, cut out

from the rest, flung.

Every year we’ve seen it

green, simmering spruce

in vertical schemes

teeming endless lines

needling shadows

and calls, eggs and layers

of weather so deep

articulated topographies

show ground

relating to species

as lungs to song

until smoldering

like fiction,

razed the scene.

Now our steps push ash

pack debris

in a grayscale no calls

or cries can punctuate

elevate or remake

this steepening grade.

MK Sturdevant's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Orion, Newfound, X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, Tiny Molecules, The Lily Poetry Review, The Nashville Review, The Westchester Review, About Place Journal and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Montana Prize in Fiction and was recently nominated for a Pushcart. She lives in the Midwest.

Process Note: My process is pretty irregular and seems different for each piece I write. In general, I find myself chiseling off so much of what I've built that my pieces often end up being something entirely different than what they were in the beginning.