Devotion
by Ruby Hansen Murray
For years, in the women’s rest room at Dismal Nitch,
a bouquet of wild flowers,
white honeyed verbena, stalks of grass.
How small things stitch the fabric of our lives,
river gray toward shore, the ridge beyond.
The worker saved a plastic bottle for a vase,
held golden poppy beside purple vetch,
a language spoken, a secret shared.
a bouquet of wild flowers,
white honeyed verbena, stalks of grass.
How small things stitch the fabric of our lives,
river gray toward shore, the ridge beyond.
The worker saved a plastic bottle for a vase,
held golden poppy beside purple vetch,
a language spoken, a secret shared.
Ruby Hansen Murray writes creative nonfiction, poetry, as well as essays and reviews. She’s a columnist for the Osage Nation News. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Poetry, Michigan Quarterly, Ecotone, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Pleiades. It has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best New Poets, and Pushcart Prizes. She’s an IN NA PO and MacDowell fellow, winner of Montana and the Iowa Review Prizes for Nonfiction. A citizen of the Osage and Cherokee Nations, she lives in the lower Columbia River estuary with husband and a feline companion.