Scene by Mike Dillon

The blue, bovine river

and its cargo of silence

doubles the sky.

The afternoon drifts west

past the green candle flames

of seven poplars

and a golden field 

where a red-tailed hawk 

tightens its circle.

A white cloud drifts north,

definite and benign 

as a parish map.

Sweet, posthumous clarity.

The earth my happy ghost would behold

without words or name, at last.

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Mike Dillon lives in Indianola, Washington, a small town on Puget Sound northwest of Seattle. His most recent, full-length book is Departures: Poetry and Prose on the Removal of Bainbridge Island’s Japanese Americans After Pearl Harbor (Unsolicited Press 2019). Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, The Return, in March 2021.