In April

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Who has time for a diamond?
I want a field, where birds

genuflect as they peck for food.
At the edges, sword ferns

rattle their blades in recognition.
All grasses wear the rain

as lace. The hawthorn’s a new
green heraldry of bud. The swallows—

they are combing the clouds’ trailing hair.

Jory Mickelson‘s first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, was the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications include Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, Diode Poetry Journal, The Rumpus and other journals. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and were awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico.

… return to Issue 13.2 Table of Contents.