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Published: Fri Jul 1 2005
Diego Isaias Hernández Méndez, Convirtiéndose en characoteles / Sorcerers Changing into Their Animal Forms (detail), 2013, oil on canvas. Arte Maya Tz’utujil Collection.
Sheds

_       _ Out back. Behind the house. A place for the lawn mower or long planks you might need some day. A place to cool off, the ratty old recliner letting you sink in. Your magazines swell and throw spores from turned pages. Put in a little stove and you can ride out the winter want-tos. In some, things have been done that God should have prevented. Some have saved marriages. Small mammals sleep in their underpinnings and black snakes hunt their reserves. I have seen their tin roofs catch light and become radiantly blank the way the sun erases the figures from the panels of an altarpiece every day at a certain time.

Michael Chitwood has published four books of poetry. The most recent, Gospel Road Going, was awarded the Roanoke-Chowan Prize for the best book by a North Carolinian. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Threepenny ReviewThe New Republic, Field, The Georgia Review, and numerous journals. (updated 2005)

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