by Martha McCollough

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Martha McCollough is the author of Wolf Hat Iron Shoes (Lily Poetry Review Books 2022) and the chapbook Grandmother Mountain (Blue Lyra 2019) . Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, The Boiler, RadarPoetry, Bear Review, and Tampa Review, among others. Originally from Detroit, she lives in Amherst, MA.

For accessibility screen readers

Soft clouds boil up from mountaintops, catching the light that flares along the snowfields. Trailing horsetails drift through the zenith. All that is far away. Meanwhile, I’m here in my failing body; a close-up spoiled by cars and signs, mud, biting insects, all that mess and excess of detail. How many untroubled green ways have I seen from the window of a moving car, each a path maybe to paradise, there, gone, unrecoverable.