Levees break in the brain. Wind

flips the leaves over. This

late morning the sun

still hasn’t burned off

the bad dream from earlier.

Something is subtracted, added

from what you thought was

permanently. Everywhere I

is under construction. Half of this

is an illusion. See here you

there is no place that does not from.

Observe the pieces piled around

temporary walkways, cocoons

wrapping condos. Before our

earthen time, directionless

hardens into labyrinths—later you

always mistake it for

what changes.

Author Image

Garret Burrell attended UCLA and Sarah Lawrence College. His chapbook, The Plague Doctor, was published by Achiote Press in 2008, and he is the former poetry editor of At-Large Magazine. He has been at work on a book dealing with global warming and evolution. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Erica Wright
Erica Wright is the author of the poetry collections All the Bayou Stories End with Drowned and Instructions for Killing the Jackal. She is the poetry editor at Guernica magazine as well as an editorial board member of Alice James Books. Her latest novel is The Granite Moth: A Novel.

At Guernica, we’ve spent the last 20 years producing uncompromising journalism.

More than 80% of our finances come from readers like you. And we’re constantly working to produce a magazine that deserves you—a magazine that is a platform for ideas fostering justice, equality, and civic action.

If you value Guernica’s role in this era of obfuscation, please donate.

Help us stay in the fight by giving here.