Thrush Poetry Journal
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Anna Leigh Knowles 
​​

Dragon’s Den           

                                       An AA meeting space, Englewood, Colorado 

For another hour Jessie and I would roll in dirt, rub our hands in the creek
and keep away from older girls with purses calling us bitches.

If we found a carburetor in the buffalograss, we’d kick it, lift from the legs and drop 
below den windows. Craneflies twisted into webs as we set them on fire.

I’d steal ceramic mugs from the community kitchen and hide 
them all under the orange tweed couch like tree stumps, told no one.

We’d splay arms like searchlights along the undersides of the vending machine―
except there was no change, no reaching out then pulling in. We never quit

cramming overalls with sugar packets, filling styrofoam cups with warm water.
Like torchbearers we excused ourselves between the crossed legs of shaky adults 

asking God to intervene. And still, our lives became unmanageable.
We meant to be good with pain—hungry and amazed.

Once, mom caught my arm, whispered this is the last time so in the bathroom 
I’d stand on the toilet, listen through the vent, hear her voice revision the week’s struggle 
to feed us, keep us safe.

I still have the chant stitched in my skin. Across the woods, through them, we unhid 
from the fox-trails pulling burrs from our shirts. I still have my mom

reading to us from the bold-print looking up at the split
scroll of twelve steps suspended ceiling to floor, rolling

with the open and close of doors like it was made of breath. 
I’d see men around her and shoot them down my fingers pulled into a gun 

behind her skirt. Sometimes they’d smile at me and I’d pretend 
to make gators with my hands instead, the word blood. They knew what I meant.





Ghost Town 

             Carson City, Colorado 
            the Continental Divide  


At 12,000 feet, the timberline sheaths from tundra overcome 
with columbine, one by one, turning from the scattering 
of rockfall.  Over the pass, shadows
snag laths of tumbledowns crushed into the mountainside. 
A silver mine rusted dark as slate 
bathes in the alpine light as last year’s snow 
cankers through perennial, refusing it.
All windswept and once-was, nothing stays long enough 
to gather whatever is offered back to the Earth except this rumor of a city, 
as if those who lived here knew one day, we’d be here to break 
our apologies across the range. Echoes bend, vapor slips from peaks. 
We’ve been trying to belong to them. 
Here, my mother’s voice calls for me through sagebrush, larkspur, I see her
white scarf crying out from under the arms as if to lift her up, as if she asks for it―




Anna Leigh Knowles is a MFA candidate at Southern Illinois University-Carbondale. Her work has previously appeared in San Pedro River Review and Puerto Del Sol. She is currently Copy Editor for the web anthology www.poemoftheweek.org




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