September Again

This month of your birth
has crept in upon me again,
slipped over the window sill
and into the corner of my room
where a perfect square of moonlight
seems to have up taken residence
and, outside, where the birds,
a whole choir of them, whose names
you never bothered to learn even when
mother recited them over and over again
as she pointed to the secret places
she thought they were hiding
under eaves or in the tangled branches,
are singing their hearts out
as she would always say then
and where now the boisterous cicadas
are joining in that twilight overture

Atomic Ghosts

She’s tethered to me, I’m lashed to you,
you’re snapped onto him, and he’s
gone, all gone.

I suppose we’re all goners
in the Let’s-Make-An-Us game,
no longer able to start a match anew,
toting our baggage along—
either dreams-gone-wrong
or unreal ideals that we steal
from the stories we hear.

The need to pair starts at the atom.
We’re just adhering to nature—
free-radical reactions taking what we need
from what we next rub up against,

How

I do not know how it is possible
not to pause, to stop, to listen
when a single bird’s first notes
suddenly rise above the subtle hum
of the city’s opening or to ignore
the wonder when one spring day
descends unexpectedly to revive
this town in the midst of winter.
I do not know how to sing praises
as wholeheartedly as the throng
of crows gathered at the crown
of a leaf-barren tree whose cants
seem like cacophony to me
but must be the joyful noises
that they were made to sing.

I do not know how.

In Praise of Windmills

As a single bird fixed in motion pins the sky to itself
remorse grows freely along the wetlands where compromised waters
breed few and far between flowers of great beauty and the human brain
spews soft gray clouds cloudy with truth

I am that river that cleanses—
the invention of a self set apart in ignorance of its own choosing
to be the not music and the not poison
a fluid dynamic of ceaseless production forsaking the concerned landscape

and a bitter end

Sanctus

I doubt your existence
not your suffering

In your tall houses I have seen you
the site of execution

your electric throne

and lofty stone arches exquisitely formed
echoing your screams

Walking this morning barefoot in the garden
I watched your handiwork

a green bottle fly

resting its metallic halo
on a leaf of my beloved apple tree

Paper Lanterns

Paper Lanterns The self was invented after it was discovered that rocks plummet back to earth when tossed towards the sky, and that all laws are the same whether inside or out. But this is assuming that the self should be like a stone and not a bird or flower, a petal-light charm drifting casually […]

Instructions for My Proper Burial

Instructions for My Proper Burial When I die, don’t you dare put me in a box, And don’t you dare put me in a yard with other deadboxed. Don’t you dare. When I die, separate me into the humors. Sort me into my constructive pieces like the Egyptians did. Cut my feet at the ankles […]

Delta Mouth

Delta Mouth Moon pull swift tide bringing arrowheads quiver dropped loosened skirt strings tight arm and notch to bow dead elks bloat in the shore foam Moon swift pushing so saturnine up a slick and bawdy ship hull up a sickly girl-thigh on a naked shoreline Moon full drip ink on a violet dry notches […]

Nature is Calling

Nature is Calling Grass of mysterious light, Do you become dry from lack of love? Nature has this bearing on all of us, Take out a white paper. Draw the red cardinal bird Singing wet songs for your neighbors. Purple lilacs left a trace of dry dirt But for once They were alive with love […]

Dearest Gaia

Simone Liggins earned her MFA in Writing at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics of Naropa University. The foundation for her love of writing and literature was paved at an early age and blossomed during her teenage years through the kind of tortured freedom that only the ostracism of high school can grant a person. […]

Visitant

Literary pilgrims welcome

nature