from Fieldguide to the Southeastern Idaho Phosphate District
[An Introduction to the Cycle]
The southeastern corner of Idaho, just east of Soda Springs—a woman reminded me of someone I met, once, in the woodsmoke of the patio on my uncle’s property, the last summer before he went to prison. Things turn sometimes & you end up in a place you surely thought someone would be, just not yourself. Or that person is you, though you are no longer who you’d trained yourself to live with, & hardly recognize the expressions in the mirror. The way her gaze, your gaze, (I admit, it was always you) attenuated outwards towards the junipers, though I could tell, as you fringed the hem of your sundress, that you were inside yourself, investigating, running over & over, like a waterwheel, like infinity, like time, whatever it was that nourished you. A feeding. We do this to ourselves, this erudition. Years later, calmly whispering into the receiver became the same as shouting at you, heart full of woodsmoke, across that field. It was a sort of loss, as if I were only remembering a conversation we’d had, & needed to search it out, as you’d searched out whatever it was you had to find before it, bright as decay, a reckoning, found you.
Jesse DeLong‘s debut manuscript, The Amateur Scientist’s Notebook, is forthcoming from Baobab Press in April 2021. Other poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press. Besides poetry, Jesse DeLong has several chapters included in the creative writing textbook, Once Upon a Time in the 21st Century, forthcoming from the University of Alabama Press.
