Archive
Monthly So the Moon
Moon with its most voice, size,
has called again water off the near shore,
and sea grass, all combed, points to its exit.
Gulf and green oceans beckon the blood.
And the same cool friendless planet, lonely
for fluids, calls larger on the sea masses,
after which even cupfulls incline to it, glasses
tip their meniscuses and tank cars list
slightly on their tracks.
Even the ospreys about to dive
must respond in a small way, and everything liquid,
we in our blood baths, faintly lean
to the place where water uncovers
the wishful moon, the purpose of its gravity:
a few treasures, hermits, the closest stars.
by Allan Peterson
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Cyclamen
A furious-pink cyclamen
now grows in the green
ceramic cube with no
escape for water. I had
a fuzzy old brain
cactus that couldn’t
survive so long
a wet season,
although I kept it
as if it were alive
sometimes using the pot
for a doorstop in summer.
When I finally let go
and dumped the papery
body into a corner
of the garden
by the rosemary
and the woodpile,
I discovered someone
had mixed the dirt
with styrofoam peanuts.
You could almost see
how the mind works.
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Confession
Forgive me
they were delicious
—William Carlos Williams
Like Williams and his plums, meat
turning to sugar under skin, I confess
my sin: I’ve eaten the apples
that ferment in tall grass, abandoned
when the life fell out of the place.
With the first cold days, at night
they freeze, then thaw a bit by noon,
last warmth of October
drawing these few incorrigible bees
who still bother to venture across
this rotting round globe.
by Todd Davis
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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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qarrtsiluni 