Mary Rose Manspeaker

Conditional

Somewhere, a tree is always
toppling, timber meeting land

no longer bound & held by root. Their
closeness severed, left to life in fable:

If an idea of the world existed,
then the world came to inhabit it.

Or, put in a way closer
to the matter at hand: There were only the people

& the trees they felled; & then
the constructs buried where the roots once lay,

systems architect to the end
of the people & the trees

& their fondness for each other.

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Mary Rose Manspeaker was born and raised in West Virginia. They currently live in Brooklyn, where they are an editor at Three Rooms Press and teach at St. Joseph's College. They are a 2021 Brooklyn Poets Fellow and their recent work appears in Hobart Pulp, Longleaf Review, Josephine Quarterly and elsewhere.