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Craig Finlay

On Drummond

Squatting on a flat rock

You brushed your teeth

with lake water so clear

it looked more a rumor

than anything else


You gathered driftwood, bones

along the black pebble shore

weathered the same

we ate pears in a bowl

of jack pines lakeside


And how am I this way?

that I see such a thing

and think, performance

if I woke tomorrow

as a deer, I fear I’d dismiss

my own antlers, steaming flanks

frost-strewn prairie grass

as a gaudy display of nostalgia.

Craig Finlay is a poet and librarian currently living in rural Oklahoma. His poems have appeared or will be appearing in numerous publications, most recently The Ilanot Review, Little Patuxent Review, Levee Magazine and After Happy Hour Review. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, is being published in March, 2020, by Urban Farmhouse Press.

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