[the war is so lurid]
the war is so lurid that everything else is dull.
a great watery animal breaking itself on the rocks,
sending up stars of salt,
loud clouds of spume.
bivouacked between worlds.
*
it’s a lie.
frantic little sparrow under the eaves.
There has been a terrible dream in the apartment above you,
and the tenant is pacing.
I’m brought back in the dream; but this, too; so often this, too.
how many times do you have to die before you’re really dead?
Devon Wootten is a faculty member at Whitman College. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, LIT, Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Drunken Boat, Octopus, and The California Journal of Poetics, and others A former resident of Yaddo and Anderson ranch, he is a graduate of the MFA program at the University of Montana and ABD in the Comparative Literature Program at the University of Iowa. He lives with his wife among the wheat fields of southeast Washington. He curates wikipoesis.com. More at devonwootten.com.