Settlement
We discovered this planet
together and started setting
down what roots we
could in the rocky soil.
Trees were not trees,
and bears were not bears,
and the sky was like
nothing we’d seen before—
more gold than blue.
Still, though, we made a home.
After all, a home usually
ends up making itself,
and one day you wake up
to falling non-leaves
as natural as anything
that’s fallen before.
Vivian Wagner’s work has appeared in Slice Magazine, Muse/A Journal, Forage Poetry Journal, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Gone Lawn, The Atlantic, Narratively, The Ilanot Review, Silk Road Review, Zone 3, Bending Genres, and other publications. She’s the author of a memoir, Fiddle: One Woman, Four Strings, and 8,000 Miles of Music (Citadel-Kensington); a full-length poetry collection, Raising (Clare Songbirds Publishing House); and four poetry chapbooks: The Village (Aldrich Press-Kelsay Books), Making (Origami Poems Project), Curiosities (Unsolicited Press), and Spells of the Apocalypse (Thirty West Publishing House).
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