Contributor: James Robert Rudolph

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The oleanders, they’re most beautiful here, he said;
It’s the drought, they suffer, she replied absently,
her eyes soon slits,
narrowing, shielding,
against this elemental place.

A roan dust settles,
stasis, the mastication of a locust warns,
the vigor of its slow
disciplined climb up
a beheaded blond grass stem now
balances undulating segments,
pupa pudgy.

Oleanders in the lurid colors
of healthy organs,
for only fresh anatomy,
something taken from within,
could dot the sky red
in this place of
brown and ochre and brown.


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James Robert Rudolph is a retired psychologist and teacher having returned to old haunts in northern New Mexico after a busy career in Minneapolis. He is attempting a resurrection of poetry and playwriting interests and finds Santa Fe a rich, if not always willing, muse. Creatively he aspires to the crafting of work that expresses honest experience in beautiful language, complex or simple, as serves the work’s purpose.