Sawdust

 
With what do you associate the smell of sawdust?
Sunlight? When I remember
you I have to squint.
 
Stack of tires skinned
into disrepair. Used to be
a phone booth, weeds. Sheetrock,
scrap metal, dried mastic, crushed cinder
blocks. Backgammon with uneven stones.
 
This cast-off window frame in the right
place would make art. What if I
lay it over the gangly sage-
brush, with its gentle
emerald, dry
and wild.
 
A flower grows through
the jagged hole someone made
in a can with a stick. Let’s spread your
ashes here, away from the long footpath,
where the scratched siding bellows its gleam.
 
 

Gregg Murray is Assistant Professor of English at Georgia Perimeter College, where he is a contributing poetry editor for The Chattahoochee Review. He has recent poems in DIAGRAM, Caketrain, [PANK], New South, and elsewhere, as well as ones forthcoming from Birmingham Poetry Review, Berkeley Poetry Review, and Phantom Drift. Gregg also has a chapbook, “Ceviche,” from Spittoon Press.