Archive
Chair, Formerly Red
Yesterday in the woods behind the shed
I found one of the metal chairs mother placed
for you — every 30 feet, wasn’t it? —
so you could get out and walk. Tucked
between white pine and some old farm
equipment rusting under an A-frame.
Small as a schoolchild’s; poritic, thorn-sprung.
Nibbled by a decade of freezes and thaws.
All things revert to form if left long enough,
you used to say. Relieved of the burden
of bearing your weight, the chair
has given up bits of itself to the wild —
red hue to rust, smooth finish
to stubble; less matter, now, than negative
space — a crude outline of a chair, linocut,
the details gouged out. But see
how the steel fibers stretch
to bridge the gaps, as skin closes
around a wound. Tentative.
Stripped. Still holding.
by Laura Ring
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Air Is Not Nothing
What did I think the hectic bats
and nighthawks were doing,
swooping and skimming overhead,
if not feasting on the invisible?
Air is not nothing, and at night
thickens like soup with moths, gnats,
sticky-shelled beetles, junebugs,
mosquitoes, midges, black flies,
and the tiny specks we call no-see-ums
that flit right through a windowscreen.
Stand still long enough, and you’ll hear
the true music of the spheres:
a million tiny wingbeats, rustle
of grubs and beetles in the leaf mat,
tremble of antennae and eyelash legs,
the minuscule wind of earwigs,
spiders spinning their convolutions,
caterpillars munching grass blades,
mosquitoes with tiny engines revved.
Now, the glitter of a cattail stand
blossoms with fireflies, all those bellies
aglow with lust in this humid air,
those sudden constellations
fading and re-forming all night long —
a Morse my mind can read
all it wants while my belly glows.
by David Graham
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Outside
It’s one of those days
when the cold, fog-dented sky
won’t let you see even down
to the barn from the house.
On days like this
the silvered grey air
sticks in your lungs
like campfire marshmallows.
The cold of it slicks off
your fingernails. And the cows
in the barn loafing area
are hunched nearly into the letter C.
Only the Indian Runner ducks seem
to welcome this damp air.
Eating cracked corn & sunflower seeds
washed down by gulps of fog.
by Ed Higgins
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Ghost Web
(Click on image to view at larger size.)
by Chris Hayes
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Audition
The enormous orb-weaver Nephila
hangs her old microphone under the eaves
Each touch of life points to her and sings
to her weaving legs like a star’s twinkle-points
Each voice steps up and croons through her diaphragm
She listens to her legs She hears the song
of something delayed its frantic wings sugar-glazed
She moves with her quick lace napkins
and composes a white note concerning a fly
by Allan Peterson
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Something Got Inside
The mouse in the drawer
shitting over dish cloths
& towels. The snake on the closet’s
lowest shelf. Spiders in the corners;
crickets. Silverfish, roaches
nesting in cabbage-rose walls.
They appear so… unlovely;
so sleepily common.
Found during our doings,
our common days.
It can seem they wait — for us,
our finding. But that is,
exactly, wrong:
they would be inside,
move through our drawers
our rooms, regardless;
they would do what
they would do. We examine
the lips of glasses,
the tines of forks, inside
our shoes. Canisters
for webs & husks & leavings.
Something inside is wrong.
Something small that is not us.
by RJ Gibson
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Daylight Saving Time
Yesterday the field stretched away from the road,
empty except for the broken stalks of last year’s crop.
Today it is filled with arrivals and departures.
For now, the light stays later, but so does the dark.
Yesterday the tree was silent; today it sings.
High in the branches, an abandoned wasp nest peels back its layers.
A car pulls up to the stoplight, corner of Randall and Big Timber Road.
On its bumper: Lithuania in NATO.
In six years, the driver has not seen another issue
worth the effort to clean his bumper and replace the sticker.
He remembers late winter lingering in that other place,
the same dry stalks, the same blur of wings;
but the farmhouse was of stone, the barn still in use.
When the light changes, the line of traffic moves forward
and the geese stir and rise, stir and rise.
This may not be the right field.
It may not be the right time.
by Susanna Lang
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This is Nebraska
To the farmer
the field is a circle,
a finely drawn
poetry of wheat.
To the clerk
the field is a courthouse,
an unfamiliar city
lacking stars.
A story is a finished
animal, a calm voice.
A courthouse is a flying
desk, a game of cabinets.
The farmer is a field of wheat,
the clerk is a hill of ants.
The animals have disappeared,
sent to watch the night sky via satellite.
by Boe Barnett
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qarrtsiluni 