The yard looks still.
Winds riffle green-coin
leaves, slim white-preened bark.
Sage blooms rust and scratch, each purple nodule
at last breaking in breeze
to settle in a riverstone crevice.
Pale roses wilt.
Ridges curl, brown-strafed.
Below, roots mottle and twist, an endless
lurching and creeping through undersoil.
Ants hustle through flagstone
fissures, scream a frenzied silence.
Harvest is hell. A spin to thicken before fall.
Spikes of green fronding into an afternoon,
a horned cloud above bursting with the violence of spill.
Originally appeared in The Lascaux Review
***
Amie Sharp teaches Creative Writing, English, and Literature. A native of Tennessee, she received an MA in English from the University of South Florida and an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University. She is a member of the Colorado Poets Center, and her writing has appeared in dozens of literary journals and anthologies, including Atticus Review, Badlands, the Bellevue Literary Review, BlazeVOX, the New Plains Review, Tar River Poetry, and Valparaiso Poetry Journal. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and was a finalist for the Lascaux Prize in Poetry. She has performed at Bridgewater International Poetry Festival and Houston Poetry Fest, and she spent the summer of 2018 as artist-in-residence at the Sabina Cultural Association in Casaprota, Italy. She has led workshops for Poetry West, and is co-chair of the Pikes Peak Community College English Department in Colorado Springs. Her manuscript Flare was a semi-finalist for the Crab Orchard First Book Award, and her chapbook The Sabine Women won the Red Dragonfly Press Emergence Poetry Prize.
