• HOME

  • CURRENT ISSUE

  • ARCHIVED ISSUES

  • ABOUT

  • CONTACT

  • More

    Shake Out a Blanket and

    Watch What Worlds You Release

    ​

    by Brianna Noll

    ​

    ​

    The deer’s been overtaken

    by the forest, her mossy

    underbelly its own habitat

    threatening to green the host’s

    mottled pelt. This is not like

    the carcass some wild thing

    dragged into and abandoned

    in my yard when I was a child,

    though it, too, was teeming

    with life. No, this is living

    upon the living, lovely and

    dangerous. It’s easy to forget

    when you live in a city how

    incessant nature’s sprawl.

    We watch as a group of four

    women drill a hole in concrete,

    but we’re not thinking about

    what lives underneath. Here

    we think about work—not

    the work of biology but labor,

    which has its own sprawl.

    As with anything alive,

    the aging of labor is visible

    yet somehow still lively.

    If we sit back too long

    the forest will creep

    onto the freeway. Idleness

    is green, so we must never

    sit. It’s easy to be bewitched

    by stoicism when every day

    brings new means of feeling small.

    Next Poem

    Copyright © 2018 Kettle Blue Review

    • Facebook Clean
    • Twitter Clean