EASTERN IOWA REVIEW
  • Home
    • About Us
    • Masthead
    • Port Yonder Press >
      • Chapbooks
    • Eastern Iowa Review
  • Guidelines
  • Current Issue
    • Issue 16 - Come, Wander
  • Past Issues
    • Lyric Essay Issues >
      • The Lyric Essay
      • Issue 10 - Spring 2020
      • Issue 8 - Spring 2019
      • Issue 7 - Print Anthology
      • Issue 6 - 2018
      • Issue 3 - 2017 >
        • Editors Note - Issue 3
      • Issue 2 - 2016
      • Issue 1 - 2015
    • Themed Issues >
      • Issue 15 - Love
      • Issue 14 >
        • Those Elves - Origin Story
        • Those Elves - The Collection
      • Issue 13 - Winter
      • Issue 12 - Water
      • Issue 11 - Hope in Renewal (An Intermission)
      • All Things Anne - Issue 9
      • Issue 5 - The SmartApocalypse
      • Issue 4 Contributors & Samples
  • 3 Sisters Awards
    • The Christine Prose Poetry Award
    • Dory Ann Fiction Award
    • Maggie Nonfiction Award
  • More
    • The Prose Poem
    • Fictions >
      • Contemporary Mystery
      • Dark Fiction
      • Debut Fiction
      • Fan Fiction
      • Honorable Mentions
      • Literary Fiction
      • Mythical Fiction
      • Speculative Fiction
      • Woods-Western-Mountain-Appalachian
      • Young Author
      • Unclassifiable
    • Prizes
    • Interviews
    • List of Contributors
PROSE POETRY
​

​KATY SCROGIN

CITY FENS


​​What is this roadside, gutted up into ruts and ugly valleys abutting the pavement? By sunrise, construction workers have colonized the street parking, sleeping in idling cars until first shift. The early arrivals step out onto curbs; the laggards have clods and wet depressions to navigate, fetid sludge-puddles of a hue so unnatural, language shrinks from describing it. Six days a week of continual occupation, dawn to dusk: the departing trucks and compacts of one shift give way
to the SUVs, the sedans, of the next. As one vehicle pulls out, is replaced by another, a lucky wash of water might be splashed or squeezed out of the berm’s oozy craters onto the tarmac, evaporating in ecstasy into the urban air, or draining slowly through cracks in the concrete, beginning the hopeful journey to an aquifer or treatment plant. The mudscape rests on Sundays, sullen and exhausted and never less than damp, rainbow films of dust and oil and bloated cigarettes sealing into immobility the still water slumped in deep-sunk centers of lumpy pools. The liquid will languish until a full day of strong sun pushes through the clumpy scum, sucks up all it can into some less viscous elsewhere. Some place to flow. On most Mondays, though, the dreggy water still stands. There’s a sigh sometimes before sunrise, and the world begins again, and there is no place, again, to go.


Katy Scrogin is a Chicago-based writer, editor, and translator, and produces the YouTube series, Lines in Literature. Her most recent publications are featured in Punt Volat, Capsule Stories, The Voices Project, and Sobotka Literary Magazine. She can also be found at katyscrogin.wordpress.com.
All rights reserved.
© 2012-2023, Port Yonder Press LLC
6332 - 33rd Avenue Drive, Shellsburg IA
www.PortYonderPress.com