[sense of place]
I SUPPOSE THE WORLD By Taylor Brorby
finds the prairie drab. Brown, mottled, void of verticality, no beauty. Blue grama, with its firecracker head, sways in the sun, and prairie dogs bark at my strange steps on dry dirt, genuflect to the cottonwood, sing with the warble of the yellow-bellied meadowlark, root myself like silver sage to a land that thrums.
A native of Center, North Dakota, TAYLOR BRORBY is an award-winning essayist and a poet. He is reviews editor at Orion Magazine as well as editor of Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America. This poem is from his forthcoming collection, Crude: Poems, due out in May 2017 through Ice Cube Press.
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