Thrush Poetry Journal
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Gabriel Welsch
​

Late Epithalamion of Appalachian Fragments
 
Put the apple   Appalachian
 
hornet sap in the
                        windfalls
 
where is the pain
            in barrel smoke
 
pinfeathers
                        a hawk abstracted
 
against a low
                        impotent sun
 
―
 
our anniversary
                                    half the time
                                    will greet the frost
 
your red finger
            pressed to white
            scrapes            windshield
 
fading essence            buck rubs
            visible in breath
 
how do I tell you         a tongue in laurel
everything                               in time
 
when I’ve yet to
                        learn                limbs

―

if I had to sing of you                         as loss
            I’d need blood slowed
                        to release the words
 
the rush in my ears
                                    before collapse
a permanent                cascade




Gabriel Welsch writes fiction and poetry, and is the author of four collections of poems: The Four Horsepersons of a Disappointing Apocalypse (Steel Toe Books, 2013); The Death of Flying Things (Word Tech Editions, 2012); An Eye Fluent in Gray (chapbook, Seven Kitchens Press, 2010); and Dirt and All Its Dense Labor (Word Tech Editions, 2006). His fiction and poetry has appeared widely, in journals including Georgia Review, Southern Review, Harvard Review, Missouri Review, as well as on Verse Daily and in Ted Kooser’s column “American Life in Poetry.” He lives in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, with his family, works as vice president of strategic communications and marketing at Juniata College, and is an occasional teacher at the Chautauqua Writer’s Center.





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