Alder Fern
Fresh in this supposed darkness, I felt my friends around the campfire and snow like snowy egrets swirled around the dark trunks of trees. However grand these staircases, and however the epochs speed by in their course, I feel justified in the stillness of this evening, hanging from branch ends, needle tips, long globes of clear water reflective of the other world. The world of trout is just like ours except upside down and they can fly and they think cars are a punishment we’ve accepted. They’re just here, this moment, not the trout they were or the trout they’re going to be, consciousness immutable flows through their forms, but it is not for them, not them alone.
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Alder Fern lives under a different name and has poems forthcoming in the Portland Review and Gone Lawn.