Working in Metal
By Poetry Issue 61
Bernheim Forest Today’s forest floor, a terrazzo of copper leaf. The remaining scrub also copper: copper breath, penny breath, too faint to call it rustling. The mother trees of summer— those iron lungs—streamed oxygen from paps that swayed sweet rock-a-byes in green blouses. But now all is brittle air. Underfoot snap and crack. And all…
Read MoreAt Land’s End
By Poetry Issue 61
Cape Breton Facing the east was the cliff dropping sixty feet to the sea: a rock- face frozen in the slow-motion act of falling. A shirred schist. A Parkinson’s of stone—sheer and delicate as a chiton carved by a Greek. Sweeping back from the cliff, a slope of steep green. Empty but for a spattering…
Read MoreThe Key
By Poetry Issue 74
The thing about nature is it doesn’t need coaching. Fire flares true, first strike out of a match. Infant waterfalls sing like experts. Acorns squeeze out oaks, each leaf a born breather. Even Darwin’s mutations. Paragons. Every one a prima donna, a first fiddle. _____________So is it not strange— child of nature that I am—to…
Read MoreEnormous Holdings
By Poetry Issue 74
All this day: a gift of abstraction. The trees sway with it, murmuring box this up, this fifth day of this fifth month, as if to say, You’ll need it when you’re gaping like a fish for kindness, for this day gave you emptiness and the permission to feed yourself by choosing not to fill…
Read MoreMaking Cents
By Poetry Issue 74
The anvil prints tails. The hammer, heads. Thirty tons of pressure, and a blank copper disk gets Lincoln and the memorial in one bang. Six billion a year, cut out, stamped, and dumped like Danae’s love shower into a tub. Dearer to make than to own, yet we don’t bother to pick one up let…
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