Anne Barngrover

The writing of the wind

prickles the way sweat dries

on skin, no warmer through
sunlight’s watery glaze.

Winter in a tropical climate
is a young woman

with gray flickering her hair.
Long, broad leaves shine

like fruit leather. Wild parakeets
crackle on a phone wire,

take flight as though responding
to an emergency. Nests reveal

themselves in the silver
branches, tangled as sea-drift.

Citrus punctuates. If the wind will
not speak, then it will write

to me on the sky’s measured paper.
The planet tilts, and I feel it.

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Anne Barngrover’s third poetry collection, Everwhen, was recently published with University of Akron Press, and her poems and nonfiction have appeared in places such as Verse Daily, AGNI, Guernica, Ecotone and The Slowdown podcast. She’s an Associate Professor of English at Saint Leo University, where she directs their low-residency MA in Creative Writing program and she lives in Tampa, Florida.