POSTCARD, BY JEN ASHBURN

​How to describe the sunset: saffron gold. I could say dandelion
but then you’d envision sharp green leaves and smell the back-lawn
dog piss and it would all be so ordinary, which it is.

Have I become a woman who writes poems about flowers?

The trees stick-figure themselves in a pathological arithmetic.
The underbrush twists up from the dirt—exquisite, sweet and thick.

I would like to take a sabbatical from myself

                                                                                   but would miss my demons,
having chosen them in an instinctive pheromonal partnering.
​
Maybe that’s why mosquitoes swarm around me so.

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Jen Ashburn is the author of The Light on the Wall (Main Street Rag, 2016) and has work published in numerous venues, including The Writer’s Almanac, The MacGuffin and Whiskey Island. She holds an MFA from Chatham University and lives in Pittsburgh.