Landscape with Russian Olive Trees and Ashram

I can’t take in enough—
      the fruity warmth
      ripe citrus honey vanilla
            and something I can’t quite place.

This must be what the moon 
smells like.

      Invasive, the residents tell me.
             This sweetness? These roots that fix
the nitrogen in the strip-mined earth?

I lean closer to the curtainless window
            breathe in through the screen
      fragrancing the arch and ache 
      of clustered yellow
      as though I too might take root.

             The four-lobed blooms
                  windmilling me. I exhale
                         so close to repair, my abdomen
                               pressed toward my spine. Here,
hammocked by a familiar longing, balm for a grief
that does not leave me.

                                          What it must be like
            to stave off erosion, to belong,
            scented and persistent.

                                                                                                                                               

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Sandra Fees graduated from Syracuse University’s creative writing program. Her work has been published in New Madrid, Quiddity, Sky Island Journal, and Calyx, among others, and she was a finalist in The Ekphrastic Review’s 2021 “Bird Watching” Contest. A former Poet Laureate in Berks County, Pennsylvania, she is the author of The Temporary Vase of Hands (Finishing Line Press, 2017).