BY Steph Sorensen
Paris of Appalachia
Where I come from rebellion is crackling and spreading like wildflowers / slow seasonal circling
snuffed and sparked again / water-willow justicia americana, pigweed, this lapsis linguae /
life creates oxygen to feed the conflagration, burn transforms the dead to food / for the living
grasped at the root / nurtured in dirt / blooming pale, deepening / planted by no man’s hand
The Most Beautiful Things Seen in the Crumbles:
The Gulf of Mexico on fire, a small sun boiling atop the grey slate of sea. A churning nebula,
round, most intense at the center, bubbling up like lava beside the rusted derrick,
steam rising in a thin mirror of the pipeline burst somewhere below.
Spikes of pink-white spruces dead and fuzzing across landscape stressed by drought.
From above they look soft as cheap velvet, something to run hands over.
Lake Mead like an ice sheet webbed with shadowed crevasses. Hot not frozen, dirt not ice.
Tamarisk green and patchy but feathering off to orange at the seams, roots reaching
for rain that doesn’t fall.
That orange sky—foreboding and unwelcome as it was, still we couldn’t not take its photo.
The sheen of bodies unable to do anything else but dance beneath the spray of an opened
hydrant, relief, droplets gone rainbow under the hottest summer sun on record again, and again.
Icebergs, symbols of absence, defined apart from ocean by negative space. Dirty white reaching
for the sky, unbelievable blue below. The way they tumble down themselves, demonstrating
the collapse over and over as if frantic, as if asking if we see it, if we understand it now.
Steph Sorensen (she/her) is a writer, parent, activist and organizer. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Necessary Fiction, Barrelhouse, Mississippi Review, and others. She is a member of the National Writers Union. Steph lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA, and can be found at stephsorensenwrites.com or @phenompen