Holly Wren Spaulding
Drought Season
Once, air purled exactly
as it was meant to.
Vapor became rain
on ordinary days.
In this way, spring
and necessary green.
It was possible
to imagine some-
thing like infinity.
But the sky is wrong
this season. The river
gone dry. Our crops
decline and children
all stay indoors with
the AC on high while
we decide to believe
in miracles to get by.
Holly Wren Spaulding’s poems, articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Michigan Quarterly Review, Witness, The Ecologist, and in the book We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism (Verso). Alice Greene & Co. published Pilgrim, in 2014. If August, will be published in 2017.