Switched-on Gutenberg

Switched-on Gutenberg Issue 20

Weather

Chatter

The lung-stunning nights of forty below

have moved eastward to my home state

and the mule deer who used to watch

with me have exited to better feeding grounds

and when I show up, it's only the magpie's flash

and the red squirrel's busy retrieval of seed

that I keep watch over as the sun completes its arc

of valley to its two p.m. drop behind Sulphur.

This is another complaint about internal weather,

as if what I have to say doesn’t matter

without extremes of temperature and creature,

when every dynamic’s nonlinear

if you attend closely enough.

Robin Chapman’s most recent book, One Hundred White Pelicans (Tebot Bach), is a collection of climate change poems. Her work has appeared recently in Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cortland Review, and Valparaiso Poetry Review.

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