David Axelrod was born in the steel-manufacturing town of Alliance, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio State University before earning an MFA from the University of Montana and a PhD from Ohio University. He is the author of six poetry collections, including The Cartographer’s Melancholy What Next, Old Knife? His collection of environmental and cultural essays, Troubled Intimacies, focuses on the rural interior of the West. Axelrod lives in La Grande, Oregon, and Germany.

Two Poems

by David Axelrod

After Harvest

If lovers part at dawn to hang all day
on the thornbush of torn wrists,
if bare beech woods on far hills
remain immobile as stone,
if crows rising with the sun
shatter ice from swaying ferns,
or on the river, near a creosote plant,

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