Austin Segrest

City Brook

Coming down the slope
and into the enclave, the tiny kingdom,

before merging with the seam
running the length of the golf course,

I heard it flowed through a house,
a girl’s I never knew, someone’s cousin.

A creek I never saw, and a girl I never knew,
and a house I only got a glimpse of

below the street, hidden in the trees,
leaving me looking down from a banister  

at it running through the den,
for a moment—before it got exposed

and lost in another body—rainless,
birdless. Its white noise

in every room. Its metallic damp
and grit you can’t get in the books,

in all the books.

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Originally from Alabama, Austin Segrest teaches poetry at Lawrence University in northcentral Wisconsin. A 2018-19 Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown poetry fellow, he is the author of Door to Remain, winner of the 2021 Vassar Miller Poetry Prize. His poems appear in POETRY, Ecotone, The Common, Ploughshares and many others.