No clouds clasp onto
the hilltops, and the bony
trees drop brown leaves
curled like fists
this summer noonday.
Across the way,
a pileated woodpecker
crawls an oak, plucks
at it from bough
to limb. The bird’s
scarlet head bobs
as it hunts for pesky
nut weevils, flashes
red while preening
the parched tree.
Crimson’s verve
doesn’t substitute
for dowdy camouflage,
but I trust that extravagant
bird’s work as it travels
trees under this deaf sky.
Header photograph © Jason D. Ramsey.
Cate McGowan is a fiction writer, essayist, and poet. She won the 2014 Moon City Short Fiction Award for her debut short fiction collection, True Places Never Are, which was also a finalist for the 2015 Lascaux Short Fiction Collection Prize. Her work appears in Norton’s Flash Fiction International, Glimmer Train, Crab Orchard Review, Crab Fat Magazine, Barrelhouse, Shenandoah, The Louisville Review, Coal Hill Review, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. A native Georgian and current, reluctant Floridian (Heat! Hurricanes! Alligators! Faulty voting machines!), McGowan is an Assistant Fiction Editor at Pithead Chapel. Her novel, Thirty Men, Not One, won Gold Wake Press’s 2019 novel competition and will be published in Autumn, 2019.
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