I Suppose the World

By Taylor Brorby

I Suppose the World

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.