Just got word from cahoodaloodaling that they’ve nominated my poem “Needing to Know How Penises Worked” for the 2015 Independent Best American Poetry. I’ll find out in a few weeks if it is accepted or not.
See the issue with my poem here: Issue #17 Grit By The Glass
Things Only People with Moon Hearts Can Do
promise our love will always wax
but then again always wane
barely intrude upon your life
yet in our absence leave you lost
set the menstrual cycle of every woman we shine upon
pour over you most intimately
from far outside your reach
inspire poetry, love songs, legends, lore
turn ordinary men to wild howling wolves
bring even the oceans under our sway
turn orange and take your breath away
contradict the calendars of powerful men
watch you promise love to me then back again
22 Hard-crust
I have loved many people in this rush
of decades I must now consider a life
or so I would have said even as late
as yesterday but strip away the fear
of hurting those I never loved
enough and the truth luster-gleams
across a thousand acres of hard-crust
snow on a clear black night
under a low full moon. How can
light be bright and cool, intimate
and vast, unimaginably vast,
regal, near-divine? No matter lies
I had to tell I snuck out to that
field every hard-crust moon fell back
into the snow until my body shook
open my heart exposed its dark
to a light it could bear
without breaking. To everyone
I loved less than I loved lying
there I am sorry. Each heart
is born to beat only so
many times and I gave mine
to the ice and moon. If it was wrong
to let you believe I could return the warmth
you gave, know the pretense was because
I did love you, in my only way.
(note – I found this image on Pinterest. It was unattributed there, but I’m fairly sure it is by a photographer named Veronika Pinke from Germany. If I can find a site where I can buy this photo I will. I’ve never seen another photo that captures just how bright the moonlight is on snow)
21 Singin’ this will be the day
How much wood would
a woodchuck chuck
if a woodchuck had a
pickup truck, a chainsaw,
an axe, and awl?
1 cord 2 cords 3 cords, more
10 cords 11 cords a dozen cords haul!
I have a rocket in my pocket
I have no time to play but
time to eat my peas with honey
which keeps them on the knife
until not last night but the night
before when 24 robbers came
to my door.
Scholastic book club, A Rocket in My Pocket:
the rhymes and chants of young Americans,
best 25₵ I ever spent
on a book, source book, my head
when left to its own devices begins
to chant these poems, beats of a life
in a predictable 4/4, comfortable
cadence of country music.
Eastbound and down, loaded up and lonely
teenage brockin’ buck, pink carnation,
pickup truck, I knew I was out of
luck the day the music.
20. always by uncles aplenty
Snow and street and rock racing
under the runners, twenty, thirty,
forty miles an hour no shame then
in screaming as long as you
call it yelling, pretending
a push on the cross bar to the right
or left could direct your
fate now. Swinging wide
round each corner hanging
on with your whole body learning
if you can’t stay on you must
roll or risk runners slicing
over hands or calves or
face. Three, four, five
at once, ropes taught from
sled to hitch to truck
driven always by uncles always
by uncles aplenty.
Pulled uphill the only time
you knew your own body’s
full weight. Rushing down you
dug in with the toes
of your boots for sliding under
the truck would be disaster or so
we’d been warned no one
had ever seen it done, the only
of our limb-risking stunts with
no medaled-hero of consequence.
How many boys had
been towed behind this truck? How fewer
girls, the most fearless
of any pack? Girls who tied their fate
to trucks could walk the hallways
ungroped as a boy, the rush
of fear the price of freedom.
19 The Silent Letter
Some letters are
too dangerous
to write to think
to say
Some letters are
too dangerous.
Stay out
of their way.
On summer afternoons
the boys played a game:
Smear the Silent Letter.
I cannot speak the name.
A football, passed,
whoever caught it became
the silent letter the word
I dare not name,
and then was smeared
for he became the
silent letter the one
I dare not name.
Everyone who played
was the same, anyone
could have made the catch.
All the boys all
fired up, only one
the match to set them aflame.
The silent letter, the one
I dare not name.
18. Now I know my ABCs
amber waves
broken axles
Carhartts
dipsticks
elevators
farm hands
green tomatoes
hay
ice water ice cream iceberg ho!
jack it up
knock it over
lay it down
mow
need nothing need nothing no-one nothing need none nothing need
opalescent
polished
radiant
sunset
tuckered out
undulating
vermin
washday
the spot, marked
yakity yak don’t talk back
zippity do dah zippity day
17 when the hunter and the hunted merge
Hickory dickory dock
the mouse ran chased
by the farmer’s wife
yielding a knife,
never in my life,
always so much
fucking strife
that could have been forfended,
all rodent chaos upended,
by the simple introduction
of a fearsome fiendish feline.
That Darn Cat.
All my life before me
and I fixate on that flashing
stripéd menace, the faint
scars that still show
on my shins. I’ve loved
dogs and horses, women
and men. In the end
why that one
damn cat?
Neither afraid to kill
or die, that one. And I,
though I have skinned
and fried and chewed what I
have shot, have lain awake, afraid
of both.
Higgory diggory
chigger clap.
Hickety pickety
crickety cat.
16. Holy Holy
Holy, the tree, cradle
of birds, demarcation of
the edge of sky.
Holy, the squirrel, bundle
of fluff, attitude, limbs
and limber, eyes agape.
Holy, the dove, its
own weight, wings, body
solid holy, not ghost
holy. Holy, Holy, Holy,
Lord God Almighty,
Almighty, alrighty, great big
Holy trinity, but not
more holy than the
tree. Does that distant
Daddy God have roots
to hold the earth
in place? Sap to
Rise singing in spring?
No old man controls
the curtains the winds
do part. The tides
that slide under even
these plains. The coyote
outsmarting the hunter. The
man whose time has
come, beating the clock.
15. a great blaze of orange and black
In the years that farmers
cleared their fields with
flames that shot orange
in the night and breathed
black smoke for days
the west wind would come with the frost
and blow their soil away.
The great prairie wind that blew
leaves and snow to the eastern
edge of every yard and field,
that once and only once
yielded magic.
Come, my father said, the wind all last week
has moved the Mississippi flyway
to the east. I’ve only seen this
once before.
The pine tree just out the front
door shimmered with the slow
beat of a million wings, glowing
in the sunrise such brilliant
orange the morning star could
only blush bright pink.
Monarchs
Warming awake, wings spread wide,
each a sacred book of prayers we knew
we once could read, such delight,
such despair, we dare not even breathe
so breathless watched them rise
from that tree, creatures made of air,
so light their launching stirred not
a single needle. Across my small
town each tree where they’d
slept was made holy, holy,
holy ever after, for once
great kings had rested there.
This Frenzy 