RAINSHADOW

by Debora Dragseth

Inimical, thirsty and dry.

No mystery here why her denizens roam. With sleepy indifference, I watch the dirt dance. The rain shadow has called me home.

JENNIFER LEMMING moved to North Dakota from Indiana 8 years ago, following her husband’s new nursing job. She lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she hands out her extra copies of the Poetry Magazine to anyone interested, usually in tattoo parlors and beauty salons in Mandan and Bismarck North Dakota. Her most recent blog post about living in North Dakota can be found by the host’s site, Hudson Valley Writers Guild, hvwg.org.

The Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range cast a massive rain shadow across the Great Plains causing the climate of the grasslands to be semiarid—a place where evaporation normally exceeds precipitation.

DEBORA DRAGSETH is a college professor at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. She was raised in Mt. Vernon, South Dakota, and is a fourth-generation graduate of Mt. Vernon High School. Unlike the gypsy scholar she claims—or had thought she wanted–to be, the author has quietly returned to the vast prairie she once so vociferously left behind.