The Flies and the Scorpion
By Poetry Issue 97
for Mary Oliver In the evening I killed a dozen flies against the glass of the window not caring for the noise they made or to see them flecking the table where we had eaten They were trying to escape had scrawled their curlicues all afternoon and could not have understood the cruelty of glass…
Read MoreI Stand and Knock
By Poetry Issue 97
All night he was wind leaning on a door you wanted to open. The whole world spilled through the hole he’d torn in his side. He had nothing to say that wasn’t your name. In his teeth his own blood turned brown. You had to see him naked, name those animal scars in their torchlight…
Read MoreChristmas Card from Kentucky
By Poetry Issue 97
They wished they could take their friends with them when they moved. It wasn’t far, trading one small town for another, not even a hundred miles across the state line. A point of pride to keep in touch, long distance calls on Sundays after supper, person-to-person for Carleen to catch them up on the local…
Read MoreIt Began with the Beginning: Alopecia Areata
By Poetry Issue 97
1. A patch of nothing the size of a nickel above the nape, smooth moon, the beginning of myth, the spread of skin and each morning’s sheddings at the feet, each little swirl, a parable, unblessed. 2. Forced to lose the one crow-shined feature I’d been allowed, each week another round found, spots, pale and…
Read MoreBird on Knee
By Poetry Issue 97
There was a man who filmed a wild bird perched lightly on his knee, an eastern phoebe, and how I wish it had been me to receive a little sign the tide might turn, shift. Think my rod, my staff, the craft of conjuring a little belief, a field of grass, a clear horizon line.…
Read MoreYanjing Beer
By Poetry Issue 97
As if we would remember only this—the perfect dust— How we slaked it, how it cost next to nothing, twenty-five Cents American, those sweating green twenty-five-milliliter bottles, Quaffing that nutty flavor, our privileged deprivation, Loving it more, that entire year, because there was In a city of ten million no other lager. This is what…
Read MoreRusted Chain
By Poetry Issue 97
Sometimes the mind rises only into its own sky The day gone to wind and last night’s rain Our names skipping like flat rocks Across someone else’s hopscotch Where once you scratched your Xs and Os. Or was that tic-tac-toe, tally where no one Should ever win, though you can blunder Badly, losing in the…
Read MoreMadrigal Aestival
By Poetry Issue 97
Nothing quite rhymes like time to kill and this long, clingstone schooling— reason traitorous, the season a bomb of decoy mimosa, birdscree, the pool under shattering low leaves, God saying now. I’m not sure I’ll ever be ready. Will I go easy, nail from a rotted board, splinter pulled from a foot surprised & bare…
Read MoreTransmigration Madrigal
By Poetry Issue 97
What’s death? Horizon kept moving by time & denial? Hank of water hung in air where love once stood, naked among stones? His hand there. By which I mean here? Ink-steeped wolf, boar, fox bristles lineate feet, mons, breast, heart in conjuring vista: the fist itching opens. A graveyard, too, a cosmos of parts; platitude…
Read MoreSparrow
By Poetry Issue 97
No one knows anymore. Or any less, for who can ever be sure about once. Or upon a time, as if time were a chair. For there was a time when time was more or less sparrow. Sparrow yes and sparrow no. Sparrow the answer answering all the questions. So. The people would put the…
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