By Nels Hanson
Nights, warm still summer Valley dark
unlit by wary farmers’ mercury lamps
touched so easily, supple second skin
as green fields after burning day softly
breathed pure oxygen, plum and peach
orchards and vineyards nearly bearing
lowest stars at flatland’s round horizon
arching the near black dome and every
constellation holding its one clear place,
each fitting puzzle piece children made
out in curved sky’s perfect jigsaw. Old
heroes, hunters, beast, all famous lovers
we could point and name if beyond two
Dippers, Orion, Pleiades we knew their
names as far eastward watching farmers
5,000 years before our San Joaquin, wide
valley called “Land Between Rivers” by
Greeks, the ancient Tigris and Euphrates.
Nels Hanson has worked as a farmer, teacher, and contract writer/editor. His fiction received the San Francisco Foundation’s James D. Phelan Award, Pushcart Prize nominations in 2010, 2012, and 2014, and has appeared in Antioch Review, Black Warrior Review, Southeast Review, and other journals. Poems appeared in Word Riot, Oklahoma Review, Pacific Review, and other magazines, and are in press at Sharkpack Review Annual, The Straddler, Stoneboat, Meat for Tea, Insert Lit Mag Here, and The Mad Hatter’s Review. Poems in Outside In Literary & Travel Magazine and Citron Review have been nominated for 2014 Pushcart Prizes.
