The dog trainer stares into my eyes with a strained, lipless smile. “See, you looked away,” he says. He is teaching me that I too, like a dog, am a predator. “I didn’t like it,” I say, but I did like it. I can’t live in this world: the world of profit. The world next to this one is no good either. However, the damp green day is as good a vehicle as any to get me there. A constellation of trees reaching. No matter how deep I go in, they can’t get me to their ending. A dark green light never takes me to the next dark green light. Or inside where a strange snow falls, pathless.
Julia Story is the author of the full-length poetry collections Post Moxie and Spinster for Hire and the chapbooks The Trapdoor and Julie the Astonishing. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in many publications including Diode, Ploughshares, The Paris Review, Denver Quarterly, and The New Yorker. She is from Indiana and now lives in Massachusetts.