Corey Sparks
Psithurism
restless
tree leaves
shush us
from just
outside
our too-
warm room
the dry
night’s cool
eschews
windows
thrown wide
like the
small suns
above
flaring
against
the dark’s
certain
passing
our three
restive
bodies
make heat
hers and
mine and
our child’s
stubborn
zephyr
brisks back
up the
canyon
climbs past
scrubby
blue oak
predawn
gray pine
toward the
rosy
fingered
false dawn
that wakes
the sprite
these days
she sleeps
sparsely
resists
shushing
so to
suss some
soothing
cadence
we slip
soft steps
down in
the still
Bidwell’s
asphalt
walk black
below
the buttes’
clinging
shadows
past the
plane trees’
ghostly
trunks the
promise
of rest
mere leaf
murmur
tree leaves
shush us
from just
outside
our too-
warm room
the dry
night’s cool
eschews
windows
thrown wide
like the
small suns
above
flaring
against
the dark’s
certain
passing
our three
restive
bodies
make heat
hers and
mine and
our child’s
stubborn
zephyr
brisks back
up the
canyon
climbs past
scrubby
blue oak
predawn
gray pine
toward the
rosy
fingered
false dawn
that wakes
the sprite
these days
she sleeps
sparsely
resists
shushing
so to
suss some
soothing
cadence
we slip
soft steps
down in
the still
Bidwell’s
asphalt
walk black
below
the buttes’
clinging
shadows
past the
plane trees’
ghostly
trunks the
promise
of rest
mere leaf
murmur
Biography
Born and raised in California’s Central Valley, Corey Sparks is an Assistant Professor of English at Chico State, where he teaches and publishes on medieval literature, poetics, and digital humanities. This is his first poetry publication. It is part of a larger project titled Florilegia, which is inspired by a return to rural California after moving around for graduate school. His work is invested in form and intimate mythologies of rural spaces. He lives in a house built in 1916 with his wife, two preschoolers, and three cats.
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