Briefly Headed West
by Binx River Perino
Patches of snow survive beside the train tracks
The lilac halo of dusk and the silhouettes of geese
and the sketched clouds above this flat land.
I am worried that here isn’t unlike there, that now
and then aren’t different points on either end
of a line, but one on top of the other. Decay
in the empty cornfields and the deep shadows give
an impression of flux. I love to believe in this—
wet roots pushing spring up into the open air!
No matter destroyed, but reconfigured. Can I
be the lain field giving itself to soil and gravity?
Can I turn these frozen parts into white wheat?
Are the surviving patches of winter arrows
pointing the way forward? The same train passes,
but it’s not the same train; and what sits at its rails
aren’t the same halos worn before. I love to believe.
Binx River Perino is a queer poet from Texas. He holds a MFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College and his work has appeared in Door is a Jar, Beyond Queer Words, samfiftyfour, Cold Mountain Review, and elsewhere. Based in Chicago, he is an occasional contributor for Third Coast Review.