Children are building cities
in the sand
All of them have rivers
They pull buckets of water from this lake
that is secretly a river, make rivulets
that satisfy their god complexes
I don’t like you! yells a girl
at a boy who has interfered
with her creation
Comfortable in the cold,
mist tendrils rising
across morning garden,
dew-dampened boots
dry in the rising wind.
Cracking this year’s journal,
I release pleasure to the river.
Behind a dome of December clouds,
the sun struggles.
Never a moment of still air. Memories
a rib-crack and a hard hard way to breathe.
In the living room a dream like an infection
hid beneath the couch covers. I kept my eyes closed
tight. What happens when a past looms against endless sky
spilling cyclones and debris. Whimpers, strings
of saliva, the space between his teeth, her doggy
long tongue. I kept my eyes closed. Displaced wind,
outside squeezing through the crack beneath
a door. What happens when history gasps.
the clouds hinted of old bedsheets
left on too long
and then the fog fell clammy
in a downing with the sun
and we were so cold
the wet seemed like wind
and the turns in the road
like twists in a tortured gut
until the steam rose with bravado
from the lonely sugar shack.
Many selves,
a raging fire, a sparkling chasm.
viper slithers to its apogee – the sun –
almost succeeds, almost destroys –
I am justified in brevity, breathing
as I, come face to face,
and so it is – angry souls in each other’s bodies –
while August burns treacherously
in the dry grasses.
Boy leaves tracks. Life trudges.
Brooding, endorsing the searing sun,
Can’t close the seed captured here,
die brother…live sister….
no distress or bitterness or revenge –
merely randomness that
divides itself unmercifully
Let’s forget the echoes
of my thirtieth year
for there’s refuge
in the night and the moon.
Moonlit night
where imagination stretches starward.
Moonlit night
where my name falls off like an autumn leaf.
Moonlit night
where I’m a sapling attune to winter wind.
Moonlit night
where my past hibernates, ant-sized.
August It is no easier to escape August than January – late summer lassitude bows the asters, curls the sunflowers just as the blizzard quiets winter. My hammock is my sled hurtling with frogs in first fall of alder leaves, swinging over plums fried on the patio, watching the squirrel choose soft figs over peanuts. […]
Read more "August"Becoming Winter has summer become your winter does sun on your skin make you shiver do happy voices and laughter drifting in sound like a howling north wind to you do you shut shutters close windows pull down the shades curl up inside while leaves and flowers are unfurling hibernating June, July and August just […]
Read more "Becoming Winter"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. Final Pitch If the grass could give a song to me, I’d plant an […]
Read more "Final Pitch"Magicians Father raised bright tiger lilies and roses the color of the sunset, that slow, daily apocalypse. Trumpet vine and Copa de Oro, orange and gold as the wildfires that ate up our dry hills each Fall, when the wind began to howl and rattle our old wooden house. Some nights, we were a family […]
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