THE LESBIAN ROADS
run ragged, rage across the snowy fields
gone white for the first time in forty years:
olive trees captured in tents of ice,
an entire orange crop lost. My hands,
gone white, grasp a worn handle
as we plunge forward on toy wheels,
lost in the frozen oranges and you can’t
stop driving—the medieval towns
toy and tie us up like bundles of snow
or flies that haven’t yet felt the net.
We can’t go to the medieval
monastery or the petrified forest—
what isn’t closed, covered in flutes of ice?
A growling dog—abandoned Vespas—
a petrified man sliding backwards, towards us
in his useless van—the army jeeps
crawling towards refugee camps abandoned
in the storm. We’re not here to witness
them. Our plans useless in the snow—
a slick water raging across the grey roads.
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EMILY JAEGER is the author of the chapbook The Evolution of Parasites (Sibling Rivalry Press) illustrated by Robin Levine. Her poems appear in Four Way Review, Apt, and TriQuarterly among others. Emily was the 2017-2018 Olive B O’Connor fellow at Colgate University and has an MFA from UMASS Boston. She has received support as a Literary Lambda Emerging Writer, a participant in TENT, and from the New York State Summer Writers Institute. Her poem “Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph” won an Academy of American Poet’s Prize.
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Read more by Emily Jaeger:
Three poems in The Offing
Poem in TriQuarterly
Buy her chapbook of poems