Read More: A brief interview with Daniel Lassell
Brush Fire
—for Luke
At night, we burned the brush
we had cut for fruit trees,
our lighters kissed to grass tufts.
The higher branches,
tipped with smoke, watched us
as we stamped our boots
into the billows, the blackened wood
hissed of life
as the cracking stems
beneath our heels mirrored
the deer bones our dog had
laid between its paws.
It was not
just that.
When we finished, we spread
the burning embers with a stick
and they looked
like constellations.
Watching the Glassmakers
The Blenko Glass Company workers, Subscribers can read the full version by logging in.
squiggled like grease, remove red orbs from ovens
and sit in chairs with filthy cushions,
wheeling flat palms down armrests.
Their tools resemble Halloween: pointed, hooked,
and clamshell-shaped, used to pinch
the whitest of heat, to stretch and lull,
dip into wooden ladles
and, in a wrist-twist, round glass evenly.
Behind the building sit several piles
of dead rainbows that met the floor, […]
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Decommissioned County Road
With these emptied cans tossed to the woods line,
an archeologist might, centuries from now,
happen across and declare Pabst Blue Ribbon
a marker of the region’s favored drink.
That the locals were, out of boredom perhaps,
intent on destroying themselves. […]
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Daniel Lassell is the winner of a William J. Maier Writing Award and runner-up for the 2016 Bermuda Triangle Prize. His poetry can be found in Slipstream, Hotel Amerika, Atticus Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and elsewhere. Recently, he received a Pushcart nomination from Pembroke Magazine. He lives with his wife in Fort Collins, Colorado. www.daniel-lassell.com.
Read More: A brief interview with Daniel Lassell.