Before the world went to hell my sweetheart
\nworked at a diner
\nnear the marshes and before that was a physicist in the desert, but now
\nwe were on the move;
\nthe whole country had uprooted\u2014she recognized an old woman
\nsoaking acorns in the river
\nas a colleague from her first laboratory job. Southerners
\nhad migrated bodily north
\nleaving fabric shreds in the mesquite, and the west was on fire. My sweetheart
\nsteamed a pot of wild mustard flowers
\nby the roadside, rain sizzling on the lid. Her shadow,
\nmy breath, the afternoon
\nthat moved on forever: people theorized the earth\u2019s orbit
\nwas off kilter, time
\nhad stopped moving right, and suddenly though we\u2019d brushed snow
\nfrom our walkways
\nthat morning, the sun began to rise two hours earlier. Smoke
\ngathered in corners
\nof the sky, and the peach trees budded, then blossomed
\nand bore fruit
\nin a week, but the fruit was mealy and filled with larvae. This was back
\nwhen we had walkways,
\nour own houses, cars, my sweetheart was a stranger in a lab coat
\nin the east
\nand I had never tracked a deer all day then field dressed it,
\nthen dragged it home
\nacross wild grass grown tall over an emptied city.<\/p>\n
Before the world went to hell my sweetheart worked at a diner near the marshes and before that was a physicist in the desert, but now we were on the move; the whole country had uprooted\u2014she recognized an old woman soaking acorns in the river as a colleague from her first laboratory job. Southerners had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[14],"tags":[25],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-180","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4340"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10299,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4340\/revisions\/10299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}