Terrain

In the trail of a finger

sliding over a map, chummy

with any field, stream,

rock, ghost,

young girl’s skin,

your tobacco stained finger

pressing heavy inside

nights cold with moon,

plowing fields,

rushing into crevices, shedding

seeds, disturbing undergrowth,

trailing over

folds of my flesh, leaving

the smell of things turned inside out.

Rose Auslander is addicted to water and poetry, not necessarily in that order. Her book Wild Water Child won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest, and her chapbooks include Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus. Also look for her poems in Tupelo Quarterly (TQ9) and the Berkeley Poetry Review (# 48). Rose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has read her poems on NPR. She is Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press, and earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson.