Posting Poetry

The curious at Red Hills Review are asking for examples of poetry so I’m posting a few of my own here. Indulge me, please.

Science

All the time I sat and listened while you
chalked the board and marked the tests,
paced beneath deer heads and the bobcat skeleton,
diagrams of creatures with six legs,
thorax, abdomen, thighs
glistening wet with the rainbow
of sweat, saliva, tasting,
kneeling, mounting, rearing,
backing into you, animal, planted
firmly inside me, memory, desire, learning.

Train to Bath

I dozed against the hard pane.
The Welsh man and his wife talked low:
rumble, murmur,
words indistinct in their marriage cant.
Elves, he said, I thought I heard,
or was it Elvis?
Elves in Maidenhead, Twyford, Reading.
Elvis in Didcot, Swindon, Chippenham.
I dreamed an elvish poem and
like Coleridge, lost it when I
opened my eyes to green fields
patched with the yellow flowers of rape,
and stepped out at Bath, on time.

Wednesdays

I stand at the sink, cleaning what’s caught in the trap:
the refuse of breakfast, congealing grease,
coffee grounds, crusty remains
of morning.

Out the window, maple leaves unfurl
new as a dress with the tags still on.
The bird feeder sways —
a sudden flash of color,
and they’re gone.
Doorbell rings. Mail drops in.
The trash collectors come on Wednesdays.

The wings I never had now itch me
like an amputated finger,
each dish I wash as shiny as a just-waxed floor;
stacked in racks, one against the other
a gleaming, fragile row.

Amaryllis

Pressed into earth, the shoot appears like a finger,
testing the air for spring;
it grows,
oh, how it telescopes its length into the room –
an arm; at its end, a fist,
clenched, unclenching
with fingers, buds, palest green,
stripping back the calyx,
and there, in the space of an hour,
what was a fingerling of green unwhorls,
now trumpets in coral-pink,
and by the end of day it’s a cornucopia,
its stamen gold-dusted,
its white pistil curving like a tongue to catch snowflakes,
raindrops,
the yellow flecks of its own semen.

Amaryllis,
I whisper your name like a lover.

Amaryllis is the title poem of a collection to be published by Scarlet Letter Press later this spring. All poems mine. Thanks for reading.

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