County Cork

JUNE SYLVESTER SARACENO

​What to make of such a place, what to make, make, make, taps the machine of making, the

alphabet confined to manufacture meaning, make sense why don’t you make sense? But what’s to be made of this cobble, this clovered pasture, this bright air of water, what’s to be made? I

would fold down the limbs of this tree for a ladder if it could help us up to see better, or bring the sky level. The wind hollows and wolves at a window, a room rattles the door outside in. No one

champions nature’s clash. A woman passing yells, “pull yer head out of yer ass man” and grasses

spring from the ground, willing witnesses, applause. Cows low and look cow-eyed unknowing the predator is snapping a photo, cooing. The sheep are bucolic by the pub full of stew. There are fingers combing through hair as if an answer might be found there. What to make of such a place – the stout hearted, the fierce music impassively played, the cliff abyss, and all the while a green of things inexhaustible, the stone of gone collecting.

JUNE SYLVESTER SARACENO is author of two poetry collections, of Dirt and Tar released in 2014 by Cherry Grove Collections, and Altars of Ordinary Light as well as a chapbook of prose poems, Mean Girl Trips. Her work has appeared widely in journals including American Journal of Nursing, The Pedestal, Silk Road, Smartish Pace, Southwestern American Literature, Tar River Poetry, and Worcester Review. Anthologies where her work has appeared include A Bird as Black as the Sun, Cradle Songs, Tahoe Blues and others. She is a professor and English Program Chair at Sierra Nevada College, Lake Tahoe, and founding editor of the Sierra Nevada Review.

The Adirondack Review

WINTER 2017