Julia Wohlstetter—Cannot Sonnet

Excerpt:

We sit in the woods,
our silence interrupted
by the sound of a man singing
the national anthem into a microphone,
too far away to tell.
His voice cracking
on the rocket’s red glare.
And afterwards, continued as we had,
in slow accumulations of color: hot pink from dried
rusted stalks, wide stratus of fog,
in layers, where thread waist wasps wove
sinusoidal waves in the margins
of the field at dusk, blue spilled
into belled fire. And grass
flittered its effect: excitement, tension,
incompleteness. My hidden stadium of it.

Julia Wohlstetter is a poet and educator whose work has appeared in Brazenhead Review, Metatron-Omega, Bodega Magazine, and Reality Beach. She received an MFA from The Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was awarded a Truman Capote Fellowship, a MacIntyre Fellowship, and a Stanley Fellowship for International Research. She is the co-creator of Poetry Practice Space at The Independent Publishing Resource Center and the author of the chapbook Please & Please / Forever Machine (2017). She lives in Portland, Oregon.

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