For the Artist I Call Moth, by Kyle Laws

Steel Mill Yard, by Allison Kipple (USA) contemporary

For the Artist I Call Moth
 
 The inspiration appears to be New Mexico
by the way the cliff behind seems carved as if coal 
 
were taken from it near Farmington, but I find 
it’s huge piles of slag, the last by-product of steel. 
 
Or Arizona for the cathedral with similar spires 
and crosses in Tucson named after Saint Augustine 
 
the Southwest full of churches behind coyote 
fences and everywhere large birds loom 
 
circling for anything they can bring down 
outside what’s meant to keep a predator away. 
 
The sky reflects dawn because the other day it rose 
in the same colours I call lemon, peach 
 
and watermelon, dark strip that’s become church 
a heavy cloud over the river obstructing light. 
 
I guess the letter after MOT is H, room and time 
for only one as the artist paints before the train 
 
pulls from the station with the scrap of crushed cars 
headed for Pueblo, boxcar dented so many times
 
from carrying debris that the railyard of Evraz Steel 
is where the canvas displays bounded by bars 
 
along Northern Ave. and I-25 as automobiles 
zoom north to Denver.
​
Kyle Laws
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Kyle Laws is based out of the Arts Alliance Studios Community in Pueblo, CO where she directs Line/Circle: Women Poets in Performance. Her collections include Ride the Pink Horse (Stubborn Mule Press, 2019), Faces of Fishing Creek (Middle Creek Publishing, 2018), This Town: Poems of Correspondence with Jared Smith (Liquid Light Press, 2017), So Bright to Blind (Five Oaks Press, 2015), and Wildwood (Lummox Press, 2014). With eight nominations for a Pushcart Prize, her poems and essays have appeared in magazines and anthologies in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Germany. She is the editor and publisher of Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press.