up the brown hill*

up the brown hill the other side I see it
quiet lay the hills lay on the hills light
afternoons snow books birches the college
made of library windows sheets of light
lay on the hills snow before the dark comes
down the valley the other side the water
made mills made canals made Utica
third city millions then rust how valley
fell into light and time into water goes
back to Manhattan I didn’t know I
was reading money’s war reading Em-
erson the richest I was and was not
in the library to try to see the hill
and valley before the dark comes down

* “up the brown hill” first appeared in Opon issue 6, 3/25/19 (https://opon.org/is- sue6/katie-naughton/).

Katie Naughton is the author of the chapbook Study (Above/Ground Press, 2021). Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jubilat, Tagvverk, and elsewhere. She is at work on two collections of poems, “Debt Ritual” and “the real ethereal,” which was a finalist for the 2021 Nightboat Poetry Prize and the 2021 Autumn House Press Book Prize. She is the publicity editor for Essay Press, editor and project manager at the HOW(ever) and How2 Digital Archive Project (launching in 2022), and founder of Etcetera, a web journal of reading recommendations from poets (www.etceterapoetry. com). She lives in Buffalo, NY, where she is a doctoral candidate in the Poetics program at SUNY – Buffalo and has an MFA from Colorado State University.

Poetry editor in chief, Fall 2007 to Spring 2008