I rub in my my hands
sagebrush’s gray leaves.
The sky overhead
well worn denim blue,
its air dry, my tongue thick.
The leaves’ smell drones
like buzzing hornets,
sticking itself into
the skin of my palms.
Wiping my mouth later I taste it.
Or, I will remember its taste:
bitter on my lips, the leaves, coarse.
But their image eludes me,
their absence leaves only the sky
of near-gone jeans and the trace
of a smell that tickles like buzzing
and fatigue green greasewood trees,
whose limbs crumpled as I stripped them,
stretch upward to an afternoon’s
looming gray clouds.
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