I know a grave in the woods
tricked with running cedar, mulched
with hickory and storms, telling heaven
to dance cobble-rock and quail-feather,
tuning up the sprouts, and all the thaws,
so they smooth and wriggle, and they smooth
and bank up every skeleton against a ghost,
so they all sing, so they all remember names
that touch like the tallest willow’s shadow
cribbing across the face of an old woman
waiting to find me here at home and alive.
Last night the sky was a child
coughing into a blanket, drawing
itself from a pale aurora jabbed
with another storm on the sun,
as if it’s got a circle of old friends
jumping tombstones. There might
have been a tribe of younger stars
dropping empty green rose-stems
through our curtains. Except last
night the child slipped its ghost
and stretched the sunrise against
the river trees.
I’m making the room
my room with
my hips,
my sighs,
my tired eyes;
and when
she leaves,
she leaves suddenly
and nothing but
her fragrance
delays,
but it’s too much memory
for me to be alone.
The picnic table. My sister’s
vaporous hair. Neighbors
in their unknown clothes.
I’m wild in blue shorts,
striped top. My mom’s
in my sister’s body.
The tenants of the lawn
rumble their tongues
like little engines and tickle
my untouched ankles.
I run the path of planets
around the wild grass
between the grass
between our houses. My
arms make airplanes.
What else is black?
A dragonfly frequenting backyards,
hunting metallically.
Flat wings, smear soot thin.
A rural road’s moonless night
where tree branches take
the passer-by pulse—they rustle
the scrape history lammed
onto bark thinly thinly
as dragonfly wings and first time
hearing white tail bucks stamp
and hiss in the pitch dark I tumble
into the ditch prostrate like a penitent.
Father, my heart freezes
stiff as those chickens
when that slaughter truck overturned
in the blizzard of ‘78
and as I walked through the empty
snow world I kicked them,
feathers all over the road.
There is mother
in smoke and shame
hiding her face how the dead
know to do. Father,
her dark eyes hair skin all
a howl of rain.
in the morning my hands hold an ocean. a ghost
of a note hanging on a clothesline the air plays
each night. i put it there but i don’t remember. i feel fine at dawn &
a needle weaves its yarn around slick fingers like a travelling sun.
my hands are faster than my feet so they dig a well. i think
in another life i’d have been a slug. pulling against myself always
leaving discard gossamer.
No More Flat Screens! Bring back the cathode-ray tubeto bedazzle us anewwith blizzards of orphaned electronspelting helter-skelteragainst the hard opaque backsideof awareness. And no more programming either!No more ambient laughterwhile wedding guests keen for their sinsand heroes go questing for the road less devouredand sidekicks turn toxic with spiteand speeding shibboleths slam into each otherand […]
Read more "No More Flat Screens!"Joseph L. Dahut is an MFA candidate in Poetry at New York University whose work has appeared in The Drake, Tail Magazine, and The Sand Canyon Review, among others. Joseph lives in Brooklyn as an educator, poet, and fly fishing guide. The Old Yard ply of birch bark peels into lattice of moon. between light […]
Read more "The Old Yard"Andrew Weatherly hears inspiration from dying trees, Hawaiian shirts, fires, and other poets. He is blessed to live in the hood, teach adults to read, dance in the streets in Asheville, NC, and occasionally slip off on pilgrimages to sacred mountains. He’s been published in BlazeVox, Belle Reve, Axe Factory, Former People, Danse Macabre, Cordite, the […]
Read more "Monotropa Uniflora, common name Indian Pipe"
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