Corey Mesler

On the Way to the Old Forest

Listening to gospel on the Wynne station—
Johnny Cash signing “In the Garden”–
on the way to The Old Forest,
where we saw, amid the leafrot and
lichen and sunstruck canopy, a
handsome snake, which slipped across
the path, startling us, reminding us that the world,
the old, variegated world, is not ours alone.

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Corey Mesler has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South, and he owns a bookstore in Memphis.

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