Drifting

By ALLISON ADELLE HEDGE COKE

Not the circus of constellations 
rifled with shooting stars  

from nights we slept by the river. 

Single star  
soft predawn flare  

            signals start here 

 on the road between green and green 

 where we’ll tussle with hour by hour 
till night falls 

 and maybe brings some stellar  
causal skyway marking time, 

              calling home. 

 

Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s eighteen books include Look at This Blue (National Book Award finalist), Burn, Streaming, Blood Run, and Effigies III. Following former fieldworker retraining in Santa Paula and Ventura, California, in the mid-1980s, she began teaching and is now Distinguished Professor and Mellon Dean’s Professor at UC Riverside. 

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Drifting

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