She sings “Dust on the Bible”
at the overlook. The sun’s
going down all orange
in polite but scattered
applause. Someone should
paint this.

A storm rakes
upriver cloud to cloud;
it’s only backdrop because
it’ll die out
long before getting this far west.
The next one I think she wrote.

Her songs
reach conclusions.
They are gathered they resemble
birds and geography. Frontiers
blend into zones and then open
space she sings something like
a sparrow that’s fallen.

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About the author

“I envision a small building-top cafe looking east, several hundred miles north of Havana.”

L. Ward Abel, poet, composer and performer of music, teacher, retired lawyer, lives in rural Georgia, has been published hundreds of times in print and online, and is the author of Peach Box and Verge (Little Poem Press, 2003), Jonesing For Byzantium (UK Authors Press, 2006), The Heat of Blooming (Pudding House Press, 2008), Torn Sky Bleeding Blue (erbacce-Press, 2010), American Bruise (Parallel Press, 2012), Cousins Over Colder Fields (Finishing Line Press, 2013), Roseorange (Flutter Press, 2013), Little Town gods (Folded Word Press, 2016), and the forthcoming Digby Roundabout (Aldrich Press, 2017).

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About the Illustrator

Joshua Sattan is a self taught artist who works heavily in digital collage and enjoys creating colorful fantasy/sci-fi lands.

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Upriver Cloud to Cloud is one of the many amazing submissions we have received so far for the second edition of the literary collection The Machinery. You can read the first edition here.

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