Rachel Morgan

1.

Given time a man
makes a house but the wind and
water make valleys.

2.
Shadows from clouds shade
a gully three blue mountains
away— autumn wind.

3.
Farmhouses below
gleam whiter. Ignescent most
of the afternoon.

4.
The bowed country road
emerges— a leaf’s pigment
in the stretching night

5.
Christmas lights left up
all year on the company house—
the shape of a cross.

 

Rachel Morgan is the assistant Poetry Editor for the North American Review and teaches at the University of Northern Iowa. She graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edited Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press) and a letterpress chapbook of her poetry, Things We Lost in the Fire, was published by Flag Pond Press. Recently, her work appears in Fence, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Hunger Mountain, DIAGRAM, and Barely South.