Keith Higginbotham

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Future Is Coming, Academics Predict

Classes are over for gaslights,
glasses, windmills, gifts
and grace. Classes are filled

with scribbles in notebooks found
in Walt Whitman’s trash.
Walt is calling us off
to barbecues at the love palace

beyond the Interstate, country
paved with fences, surrendered
to statistics. The wilderness has
bought a condo on the road

where Thoreau copped his
final plea. Classes are over
for a while, sayeth Karl

Wallenda walking with a pole
across the Tallula Gorge. Classes
are over, according to Poe,

recovering from addiction
in Richmond’s Shockoe Slip.


window rock drill

step down into sagebrush
flowers and leaves
typically three-toothed

where butterflies light
cottontails nibble
and scatter with the sound

of steps on rabbitbrush
and snakeweed landscape
without much green

sandstone layers flat
and tilted tilted and flat
sand dunes frozen

saddlehorn formations
entrada like faces
juniper and pine with leaves

needlelike explosion
of nut pine pinecones
with wings whiptail

lizard trails across collapse
of geology where monument
canyon creeps into colorado

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 Keith Higginbotham lives in Columbia, SC. His poetry has recently appeared, or is forthcoming, in Clutching At Straws, Counterexample Poetics, Eratio, Liebamour Magazine, Otoliths, and trnsfr. He has published two chapbooks: Carrying the Air on a Stick (The Runaway Spoon Press) and Prosaic Suburban Commercial (available as a free PDF download from Eratio Editions).