A Post-Industrial Spring
by Jan Worth-Nelson
Winter ends in the graveyard shift
austere branches poised
for the insurrection,
their silence cocked. They
already hear the first strike:
underground, October’s absurd hyacinth
retools for April changeover,
clanging, black dirt clogging
the brassy pistons.
The secret scilla on my neighbor’s
unkempt slope has lit its own fuse,
ready to blue up, and any day now,
the most cynical eyes, famished for color,
will start believing in sight
for the first time in a long time.
Laconic dark sprouts, twining
and lascivious. The cats are on the make.
Tonight you could hear it
from any porch – spring
cutting a green slash
through the dumb and sooty snow.
Jan Worth-Nelson lives in Flint, MI, where she and everybody else are still drinking bottled water despite confusing and aggravating reassurances from some politicians. She taught writing at the University of Michigan-Flint, and now edits East Village Magazine, a Flint-based monthly publication. Her novel Night Blind is based on her Peace Corps experience, and other recent work has appeared in Exposition Review, Michigan Gothic, the MacGuffin and in Happy Anyway: a Flint Anthology just out from Belt Publishing. She says Flint is a good creative cauldron, where as her poem suggests, at least the earth under all the tumult is "poised for the insurrection," and perhaps change is in the air.