Landscape
KJ Vande Bossche
"We are a landscape of all we have seen."
~ Isamu Noguchi
I see what most people don’t, you say,
from my rolling corner office with the
one-eighty view. And I see you: trundling
between red canyon walls so high they
disconnect phones, even GPS; lighting
another cigarette, blowing smoke out
the half-cracked window toward endless
high desert plains; downshifting, rather
than braking, through a mid-western
town, its name painted high and white
on the water tower. I’ve seen prong
horned antelope, you continue,
and yesterday, at a stop light, a girl
on a bike who reminded me of you.
KJ Vande Bossche is a poet and short story writer who teaches middle school in Bellingham, Washington. She was born in Illinois, raised in California and is currently settled in the Pacific Northwest. Her publications are included in such journals as River Poets Anthology, Crack the Spine, Sweet Tree Review, Cirque and many others. Karen has been writing for over half a century and believes she has at least another half century worth of poems and stories to share.