Jesse Fleming

The pueblo is an eye

Gone down Deposit Street
   Gone to buy stamps 

across the new bridge
   Running behind the poppies 

with the horses, so I'm
   gone up into the hills to see them 

Closed like Mar Rojo,
  wide open like Mar Rojo, 

and the tidy row of Helins and Fields
  and Calderwoods and Almacks all packed 

and the pools drained down to the dust. Soft scuff
  on the white tiles in the old school with the green roof. 

And Paula and Natalie and Victoria
   and David and Pau and Christian 

and I sat on the swings and kicked
  the weeds that smelled like soaked red pads and fish. 

Gone forgiving, gone remembering why
   it's the rainbow land and the basura sky

and the hungry air that makes me sick
   with belonging to clay

gone with bells on morning on Pascua
   on military planes clanging overhead

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Jesse Fleming is a Chicago-based writer, musician and environmental justice activist. Her writing has appeared in Backstory Journal, Minnesota's Best Emerging Poets (Z Publishing, 2018), ELDERLY magazine and others. She copyedits for Haymarket Books and has done editorial work and Spanish translation for AWP and Milkweed Editions.