Hum of other wings pulled by
the western moon. Sky teases orange
and red. Placebo: heliopsis, tangerine beauty.
Choral: coral and dropmore scarlet
honeysuckle. Find: your fleeting– a bouquet,
a glittering, a hover, a shimmer, or a tune.
Like no other creature
we have this feature –
to make life magic
or tragic with words.
Words that wound,
words that bloom.
Some words bring sunshine
others bring gloom.
Some words of ours flower
while others bring power.
Words declare war
or bring peace that will soar.
Some words are tragic.
Some words make magic.
Twenty-six letters
scrambled like eggs
combined in a zillion ways
give us power to thrill or to kill.
Watch yow you use them.
Never abuse them.
Let us learn to be
better word cooks.
-Sue Neufarth Howard
I am heartbroken
You make the better elephant and the wetter waterfall.
We forgot to picnic beneath the pines and above.
I’d be your sewn-on button. I’d be your 8 p.m. start.
We said monoculture and it turned out to be the word
we meant. What a big I you have, what a beguiling I.
The most money we’ve held in our hands wasn’t ours.
The biggest breath you’ve held made no inner ice storm.
I’ve wondered about the field we cleared of rocks.
You say you never want to stop growing but I can’t
imagine you any taller. To do just once what a kernel
does, en route to becoming popcorn. Trick of the self.
I took this job with trepidation even after experience working with
emotionally disturbed kids who were foster fails.
First night on the job for my 4-12pm shift four teenaged girls
burst into the cottage drunk and boisterous. They chased me with
the wooden handle of a broomstick yelling obscenities my naive
ears had never heard. Grabbed my only weapon, a phone, frantic to reach
the male counselor at the boys cottage across the field. Following safety
protocol. Never had to de-escalate drunk teenage girls before. Tough girls
from gang scene in South side of Chicago. Transplanted from a medium
town in Pennsylvania, to a metro area of seven million, was out of my
comfort zone. Joe zipped over saving me from bodily harm.
I showed up the next day at four.
Staff was surprised.
Dad taught me not to be a quitter.
Olympic National Park
Across this high mountain trail
The Celestial Cosmos
Illumines by starlight
Forever under the heavens
Harvesting shrimp, Kodiak AK
Long day done
Nightfall’s walk home
Down two-lane road
In a momentary flash
Bodies become framed
Emblazoned in bright yellow car light
We are light beings
San Juan Islands
Leaving the huge stone fireplace
The all-camp gathering adjourns
Into moonless night
We use no torch, no light
“Your eyes will adjust,” they say
There is the trail, a dark root
Silent trees stand sentry
Tred softly like deer
Sight in the still dark night
The last slithers of sunlight
streak across the pine trees
daddy planted when I was a kid.
Now, they’re at least as tall as I am old,
arms reaching to the sky,
needles splayed casting shade
out into the yard and down on the creek.
I’ve seen these trees from every angle
for as long as I can remember,
a background of childhood
taken for granted
as I climbed on their skinny limbs,
gathered needles for concoctions,
swung in hammocks fastened from trunks.
I stare at them now, wondering
when they grew tall enough to cover
the peaks of the hills,
when their limbs laced in patterns
thick enough to block the light,
when so many years
managed to escape my mind.
two words collide
movement
light
strangely a record on the sidewalk
broken
shattered and I wish it wasn’t
an old-timey country singer
“I Saw the Light”
memories and though I’m not that old
I recall songs from my childhood and just knowing
I would like to circle around today, sing it
play it on instruments and then eat
guitars, piano, drums
a novelty, sure
yet everything that matters
stories
interesting that while walking
searching as always for the next
thought, reason, adventure
it was on the path
reminding me to look, listen, and keep moving
if we
knew then
what we know now
we’d fuck it
up again,
anyhow.
it’s not what
or who,
you know,
it’s what it is,
it goes to show.
shake my head.
it goes to show.
Our little bodies were guarded,
Sun-warmed and defended
At watch on the boundaries of the blanket on the lawn
Butter-yellow and threadworn cloak of becoming
Right here, an impossibility of clouds
Right here, pulled in by the tide of our wishes
From the tousled heads of dandelions
This one looks like a ship.
This one looks like a dog.
That one looks like a memory—
Our foreheads, pressed together
Sticky and giggling
Dissolved by distance, each
Staring straight into one Cyclops eye,
Making us something fierce enough to survive the oncoming storm
“It’s so much harder to be grown,” the oracle intones
Forgetting the transient powerlessness of being
Children
So many decades—epics—away, I am
Right here
So close
that if i stretched out a lotus-fuzzed tongue i could take
a fibrous swipe
of this cloud and feel that spun memory dissolve,
briny and petrichor on my breath.
So close that it could rest its misted forehead gently onto mine,
my unrelenting heat and its ever-distant cool a
rumble
“I remember this one,” it would say, a squint at the monster I’ve become, all admiration and no fear,
“This one looks like thunder.”
