Selections from Print: "Field Guide" by Ash Durrance
This is a selection from our Fall/Winter 2020 issue, featuring prose, poetry, and art from over 20 contributors.
Field Guide
on the northern tip of the Everglades
By noon, we knew the sun was through with us
and our small adventure. Even the bloodwort,
the tall red ferns, and the L-O-V-E scored
in black paint below the overpass could tell
we knew nothing of them. Still, the water sung
high in light—its blues, its pale peach one more note
tossed to the eves of mistletoe and moss. Yet
another hour we kept in that good land of button-eyed
fleabane and dog fennel, of yellow tickseed
and the horned leaves of hemlock that covered
the dead terrapin’s dark-licked shell. Minutes passed
until the saw grass fell back, buckling, and a great
heron pierced through the bog nettle and the hissing
white horns of nightshade to arrow its body
above us. Now, who were we to wade in that long
empty, that once lost place and claim any of it found?
Ash Durrance is a third-year MFA candidate in poetry at Southern Illinois University, where she is a Masters Research Fellow and a recipient of the Peck Fellowship. Her work may be found in Nat Brut, Southern Humanities Review online, and is forthcoming in The Locust Review. She was born and raised in Orlando, Florida.
