by Sunni Brown Wilkinson
1 John 2:18
Haze. Fires all over the state,
and beneath our feet the ground slowly shifts,
leaving sinkholes. In the last days,
someone will come to you selling a version of your life
that is not true but gleaming. Like a horse
that feeds near the track of a coming train.
He steps over one rail as a low hum mumbles on.
There is time, it lies. The mountains were climbing
out of their bodies in the half-light this morning.
Now they are rock and tree again, and somewhere
a hungry blaze comes for them. Up on the highest ridge,
sitting for a picture, the kids dance their feet
over a sheer drop of stone and smoke. Ashen pines.
Little children, it is the last time.
::
Sunni Brown Wilkinson is a poet and essayist. She is the author of the poetry collections Rodeo (winner of the Donald Justice Poetry Prize, Autumn House Press, 2025) and The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and the chapbook The Ache & The Wing (winner of the Sundress Chapbook Prize, 2021). Her poetry has been awarded New Ohio Review’s NORward Poetry Prize, the Joy Harjo Prize, and the Sherwin Howard Award. She holds an MFA from Eastern Washington University, teaches at Weber State University and lives in northern Utah with her husband and three sons.
Image: Courtney Smith
ID: Logan Canyon in fall.
Psaltery & Lyre 