Russell Zintel, Columbia County, New York, USA
What is longed for when the hearth in your belly
Gets a kink in its blue line
The one, hotter than the hottest vein
Linking it to coals you know to be steady:
My sight tunnels into writing over a field I cherish
One lined with barbed wire
Presuming nothing of other fields
This one, as it turns out, is a mirage
Poisonous, temperate, alighting a medicinal steed
The mirage reveals a nostrum
Image of a real place, poorly remembered
As not a nostrum, not leaving the steed
Chestnuts on an emptied island
There amid the horse’s circle of bent straw
Subdivisions, a field this longing forgot
Interrupted with canopies of 20,000 years of sleep
Yearned for & not infinite, not like the alfalfa of old grazers
Haunted in photographs
Collapsible farmhouses
Grounds scattered with proud fruits
Proven too burdensome for their prickly spines of summer
What loosens the kink
Besides twisting the vein
The one that trades good meals
For clean chimney fumes in February
The season from bleachers, forest of innermost fires
& keeping up with basics, like cooking
Elderberries before eating
Remembering our hands before the walnuts are shelled
Eating summer’s sweet punctuation raw & in spirit
Choking in effigy on the resin of the rind
Which, once fallen & absorbed
Kills most growth beneath the canopy
Here, I am only asking, what species
Of the mind, besides the satisfaction of everything
Grips the color of what should flood the vein
To keep one’s head from cracking
Against the ground
Into uncountable seeds
Russell Zintel lives north along the Hudson River with his partner KT and their cat. His work has appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, decomP Magazine, Re-Side Zine and others. He is currently in progress with a full-length poetry collection.