Persistence by Mark Trechock

The crumbling steps now lead to no one’s front door, just a miniature precipice, a leap into the slumping depression left behind when everyone had had enough of whatever it was that ground them down. Resting in the soil: shattered glass; a bent fork; the scattered shards of a dinner plate; a metal box of rain-soaked recipes.

Above, the planted trees huddle, swaying like a family around a hospital bed, waiting for the doctor’s bad news, already starting to mourn, thinking of who might take the piano and whether the cousin who drinks might want to be the last occupant, or could it be rented out to a hired hand, or could the siding be salvaged for a nephew’s barn, or whether to let nature take its course.

Still, along the unworked dirt, near what might have been the view from the kitchen window, whose maroon awning someone might still remember, the rhubarb arteries stretch out straight and grasping for space, red as the face of an uninvited guest, and carry to the extremities of life the promise of one last dessert.

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Mark Trechock lives and writes in Dickinson, North Dakota surrounded by wheat and grass and quite a few abandoned farmsteads. His poems have recently been published in Passager, Triggerfish, High Desert Journal, Jonah Magazine, Kestrel and Red Wheelbarrow.