PROSE POETRY
COURTNEY HITSON
CHARMS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
How a tractor’s pesticide-stream emanates exhales of chromatic vapor to resurrect into your sightline as rainbows. The wobbling gait of an overfed corgi in a cowboy costume. Wooden, red signs engraved with “Live. Laugh. Love.” amassing in Midwestern landfills. Each morning, the melancholic weave of your car tracing the same sentence of asphalt. A pair of Converse sneakers flung skyward to catch on a powerline and dangle as if samara seeds conjoined at the stem. An autotuned rendition of “Jesus Take the Wheel” blaring from a North Carolina hurricane clean-up in November. My vegan self debating the ethics of used leather. The orange skipping-stones of students’ Dorito-coated fingers on their papers. Many, many cheese logs. The power-walkers convened at abandoned malls in the early morning to sport old-school headphones and remember a time that doesn’t exist. Every environmentalist’s frustration, pending as a cursor with an unwieldly secret.
Courtney Hitson teaches English at the College of the Florida Keys. She currently has work forthcoming in Potomac Review and Sequestrum. Outside of writing, she enjoys scuba-diving, freestyle unicycling, and philosophy. Courtney and her husband, Tom (also a poet), reside in Fort Lauderdale, Florida with their two cats.
