My Poem, North Country, was just published in Issue 11 of Livina Press. Here is the poem

North Country

Inspired by the Bob Dylan song Girl from the North Country

fair
and winter white
with unblemished
snow to my hips
and a cold so fierce
it disfigures.

These are badlands.
The border between
here and somewhere
like home.
Houses hidden behind fences
barely visible above
the snow
and neighborless for miles.

I grew to be a man here—
where the wind hits
heavy on the borderline.
This place where summer comes to die.
And if in my mind, I cross the Great Divide
one last time, in a pickup truck
as down on its luck as I am,
the treacherous wind assures me
that a flame still burns.

But in the North Country,
even the marble
markers that dot
the graveyards
crumble in the wind.