Nicole Stockburger

North Carolina State Line

If not for the crows landing briefly to form the pines
above the winter-clear world

on the mountain peak,
there would be no markers to place here

and there. What is left of this life
if no one touches the shape of me but the woods?

A layer of frozen clay. Antlers arranged in a circle.
I guess I'm always cataloguing

the old or what hasn't yet collapsed:
one bright and discarded foundation,

stone upon stone, how darkness hems
in the wetland woods so similarly to home,

and the toads drawling to each other
are reminders of your shape in the dark.

Coyotes—I can almost hear them stirring.
On this side of the ridge, I've written no letters.

This evening seems seasons away from you,
away from lust over the silted body.

When all is too quiet, I know I'm not ready
to return to where your mouth is full of summer

heirlooms and the cosmos is in spirals.
To cross back over the flooded creeks.

To try to reconstruct something worthy
from those ruins we made.

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Nicole Stockburger is the author of Nowhere Beulah (Unicorn Press, 2019). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, The Adroit Journal, Waxwing and elsewhere. Nicole received an MFA in Creative Writing from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a BA in Studio Art and English from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was awarded a fellowship from the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences. She lives and works on a vegetable farm near her hometown, Winston-Salem.