This evening, I ended my walk
with a terrific skid.
Just as I recovered
the sun peeked out
from wherever it had been hiding,
to warm my neck and face
and the streetlights,
as if to share in my relief,
flickered to life.
It took me back,
to one of those flights
from Hawaii or Japan
that landed at LAX at dawn
We banked
and I could see
the sun’s earliest light
sharing the stage
with runway lights
backgrounded
by a city so calm
and gentle
I had to pinch myself
to remember where I was.
You and I no longer
worship the sun as god.
Yet doesn’t the sunset,
for all its colorful hallelujahs,
bring with it the same odd unease
that drove our
primitive ancestors to light
bonfires to coax
the sun back to life.…
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The holes in the heels of my shoes
admit snowmelt and tiny pebbles.
Slopping around the neighborhood,
exercising my fistulous heart,
I feel electric blue abstractions
riding the chill. Being alone
with the mist blown from the marsh
and the roadside puddles grinning,
I don’t have to explain to you
the absence that three quarters
of a century of living have imposed.
The short day draws on itself
like a gray man smoking a pipe.
I’d say, listen to the wind undress
the already half-naked trees—
but you’re at home stroking the cats
and reading about current events.…
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Three days after I stopped coughing,
I got dressed to leave the house.
Put on my oldest sneakers
Certain they’d be burned at the end of the night
Along with every other surface exposed to the virus.
Your scrubs are on inside out,
My wife said.
Prepared with full battle regalia:
Bonnet, face shield, N95 with another outer mask
Goretex suit, shoe covers, two pairs of gloves
All hopes pinned on extra layers of skin
Keeping bad things out and good things in.
Don’t take your gear off under any circumstances,
I instructed my team. We spent
13 hours afraid to drink water.
Sweat soaked, I stepped into rooms
To get phone numbers, call loved ones
Yellow gowns, blue tarps, red blood
Are all I see of those first shifts
We remember not knowing how this will end
And we don’t want to go back.…
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A tarmac arrowhead released from between the trees –
shot forward with each step. Feet that echo,
scream in hollow bursts of three, are close behind.
The asphalt river is banked with hands that claw from their soil beds,
gnarled fingers twist in agony at their shed skin
lying in the road, red fish like a million paper cuts.
Tonight a car comes around the bend up ahead.
The lights slash at the darkness, flaxen wounds like two gateways to heaven.
I choose neither and it growls deep in its engine,
illuminating blood and fur before it buries itself in the burrow of black behind me.
I’m wading through waist-deep water now, anchor limbs screaming
‘you can’t run, not towards blood that’s already dried’.
A dead deer.…
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All spring the tulips
trapezed along a string
of isolate storms
to arrive at the bright edge
of the season
weathered threadbare.
Even now
the wind rears
like a hurrah of horses
trouncing their flame silks
into banners of light.
Behold the lungta,
watch them billow —
each petal a prayer flag
tethering
the earth to the sky.
– Megan Muthupandiyan…
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after Anita Beth McDaniel Swaim
1.
In a familiar wave, you set
your wires down for an edge,
are told you have taken on excess,
so you receive a cut
and feel the land fall away to the west.
You see how foreign dust
developed at a border.
You will never grow any larger.
2.
Musically, you are a rattle
breaking through tall grass,
a weighted drum of plow
felt in wooden yoke.
Even the reluctance of rain
hangs on a beat, drifting, and
again into a steep rush
sung into wide-valleyed theater.
You know to blow hard-lunged
with no warning
that spring of whirring strands unraveling
with train sounds hurled howling
in unrelenting night.
So few applaud come morning,
so few to applaud.…
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I see an oddly maligned portrait, out there beyond the field, where the trees curl up the sides of the nubby landscape, where intentions are laid bare in the shade of their leaves, drooping, thick and unctuous in the summer air. Is the way he moved his arm, motioning toward nothing in particular, an indication?
Heavy wasps float through the haze on sagging wings. Hot breath is drenched on us, despair comes and goes, all the colors from before are different now, so that it becomes harder to remember that I am me.
I float, with the leaves, the leaves and me, we float downstream in the sluggish current of the brown creek. Being younger now, I have a sense that it doesn’t end, but in a flash the tributary joins the river and loses its brief individuality.…
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