DRONE PHOTOGRAPHS OVER WESTERN SLOPES

                    by Russell Brakefield 

There is too much shifting

light to take in

at once. A blush mounts

the ridge and just as soon

is taken back by the Russian sage

which echoes a showy, branched panicle

on the sky. A silence so big

nestles among us,

the fire—with it's own impossible color—       

is left alone to click and sputter.

And later, when someone shows us

the aerial photographs

we become our own shifting

patchwork: red shirt, black shirt,

brown dog, straw hat.

Seeing the body from above,

as a single tone in a larger song, excises

a small part of the self, dismantles

slightly the process of living.

The way my father once said that

as a younger man he knew the story

behind every blemish on his body.

In the photographs, the fire ring

is its own red smudge,

and we all peer into it wildly

as though we might step in

and be swallowed

by the gorgeous, rotting earth.

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photo by Aubrey Schiavone

Russell Brakefield’s first collection Field Recordings is forthcoming from Wayne State University Press in March of 2018. He received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Bomb, The Southeast Review, Coldfront, The Literary Review,and elsewhere.