We’re outside smoking Camels
in the drizzle, and the only metaphor
involving hurricanes that I can generate
involves two people dancing
as if branches in a storm,
swayed by trouble larger than them both,
which I’m pretty sure I stole.

The smells of my old words–
tobacco, mothy flannel, junk wood,
sunbaked dashboard finish–
dissolve, and all that’s left is a wind I hear
but don’t feel blowing through me
and a rain that I can’t see
in the dark.

When did I find myself with nothing
left in me but a place
I don’t know how to write about?

—

Shenan Prestwich is a Washington, DC-area poet and graduate of Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Writing program. Her work has appeared in publications such as Slow Trains, PigeonBike, Lines + Stars, Dirtflask, Dr. Hurley’s Snake Oil Cure, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Orion headless, The Camel Saloon, and The Second Hump, Volume III, and she is a 2012 Best of the Net nominee. Besides writing, reading, hearing, watching, and sometimes tasting poetry, the wide array of things that make her happy include cognitive research, cameras, bluegrass, long drives, the great outdoors, good people, and bad karaoke.