The Rewilder

1 Minute Read Time

This photograph shows a graffitied beige wall and a narrow street with something golden glowing at the end of the narrow street. — Photo by Nomadic Julien on Unsplash

The streets cut
               so narrow you can hear 
               neighbors have sex, then,
after a pause,
               pour cereal into bowls. 
               Outside town,

at the bend
               in the road, a wild 
               fig grows over a
fence—stone, whitewashed—
               that keeps it from a farmer’s 
               planned fig grove.

Fruits bulb out—
               fertility icons—
               at their gecko-green, 
purpling bottoms.
               Broad, fat leaves spread out over
                the summer

air. This was
               what Saint Theoktisti 
               ate when she escaped
the pirates, lived
alone on this island for 
               thirty-five

years in the
               church by the waterfront. 
               But someone had been




here before, left
               their fig cultivars, in the 
               empire of

Constantine.
               Wind turbines straight as school- 
               marms dancing only
with their arms, the
               old windmills bladeless now, soft 
               road shoulder

that was once,
               millennia ago, 
               marble: entropy
pulverizes
               everything in just this way, 
               disperses it.

Snails in
               overupholstered white 
               shells clump on cacti
like some fungal
               growth or floral expression 
               of lost spring.

Cats sleep in
               oleander shade. Three 
               to six percent of
wolves harbor dog
               DNA, an “admixture,” 
               mainly in




eastern Russia.
               I would worry about 
               the wilderness, but
who can tell? A
               husband, statistically 
               speaking, is

most likely
               how I would die, 
               they kill more people
than terrorists.
               Still, it took me three years post- 
               threat to leave.

Barbara Duffey

is the author of the full-length poetry collections Simple Machines (winner of the Washington Prize, forthcoming from The Word Works March 2016) and I Might Be Mistaken (Word Poetry, 2015). Her chapbooks The Circus of Forgetting (dancing girl press) and The Verge of Thirst (South Dakota State Poetry Society) were published in 2013. She is an assistant professor of English at Dakota Wesleyan University, where she teaches creative writing, composition, and literature courses.

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