The East End by Sonya Wohletz

The clouds splay out towards East

gutted and cleaned out, leaking

Brass shades all over the grim and tired trees

that bow their heads in the familiar

language of smoke again.

I am driving too, beside the trees

as they weep without tears.

But I am going north, not East. Not to where the

words are roughly hewn or split from

soft trunks with an ache, where sadness is a meal

that lasts all season long.

Strange,

when I passed through East just yesterday

the trees had forgotten me for awhile, or

frolicked on a higher plane beyond my vision. And

all of a sudden,

It was as if the light had parceled the forest

Out all golden splinters across the

morning sky. This, they said,

is evening. And

 No one could argue with

that, though perhaps only the page--a blank

reminder that a tree is asking

For a poem, right here

even if it is only

smaller than clouds.  

And there is no denying it—

there it stands,

stricken and sick with hope

before my trembling

language as it twists itself again and again,

searching for a place in voice to take root,

to seek out a path in water—clean, green, astringent.

Even as the evening rips through

my throat with the ash

of the dead and dying.

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Sonya is a writer and researcher whose interests include colonial history, bats, the motions of the planets, and the weather. Her work has appeared in Latin American Literary Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Cholla Needles, and others.