Six Poems: Sébastien Luc Butler Winner: Patricia Cleary Miller Award for Poetry Selected by Traci Brimhall
Parallax You lie next to me night after night until your body becomes a clearing walked through innumerable times seen from a new angle. Suddenly, wild aster. The heat beneath the grass there, growing. Thin-winged Monarchs on the sparse milkweed. Garlic mustard creeping in from the shadow-thick edges. Soon it will all look so different & what does that makes us, holding this memory of what the field once was? I count the imprints your fingers leave in the hair of my arm, the steps you take through the meadow of me. I will try to step where you step. There’s the world of the living & beneath it, the world of deader things, just as full. It looks up at us as we walk from one side to the other. Dusk falls. We look for stars but the light from town covers them. Come night, the wind through the meadow is a language we both know the sound of but can’t bear to speak.