The Blog

At the Desk

R. E. Danielson

Long days at work and my back gives
so that my hands and feet
don’t care for much                 but sitting.
So I write
when the words surface.

I have the same things on my desk
I’ve had for years:          same books,          same lamp,
cigar boxes filled with things,
same pens.            I have a watch
my wife gave me when I started doing concrete.
It has a fabric band and a simple face.
It sits near a small statue of a bird dog staring down
at my hands
and that jaw bone I found along the Mississippi
years ago. 

I don’t often check the time when I write, but still the watch
has earned its place                  on the desk.

 

R. E. Danielson is a poet of the Mississippi River. He lives in rural Iowa and is working to complete a collection of poems.

Once I Was a Thimble but Now I Am a Bell

Erin Adair-Hodges

What are the words for how I feel today?
Beer can in the drainage ditch,
a litter of smittens, sunburned slash
where no arms could reach.
The morning wears last night’s mascara,
and I can be anything I want—
happy. Guilty. A certain kind of free,
as if the day is a car to which I have
keys. As if there is a road.
But I am February’s bone,
its marbled mate, de-leafed and
trembling. I was made in the image
of an image, grown hazy in translation
and a little bit of a lie. The good news
is that someday I may learn my lesson, but
the blood I make isn’t a reminder
nor is it the sin. It is the clanging—
not the hunger
but the promise of hunger to come. 

 

From RED BOOTS: AMOUR ET COEURS ET FLEURS

Dylan Carpenter

That year, spring travelled at six miles per hour, sweeping up Cape Horn through Ecuador,

Cuba through the U.S., a blush, reaching us faster than it ever had before.

When it came, we were in bed, and I imagined hearing hooves pounding in the downpour

 

Of rain; and after, I went out and gathered the seed balls of the sycamore

The storm had stripped, for you. Now what I want to do is impossible. Whatever place you’re

The anonymous goddess of, I’d like to send an extinct grackle there to tell you what I long for.

 

I don’t know. Maybe you were meant to hear my love without returning it, to walk the seashore

In a floral pinafore—I’ll sing anyway. I want to say: My heart’s still lit up like a ctenophore

Beached by high tide. Remember when you made me wait with my mouth open for an hour or

 

Nervous System

Rosalie Moffett

           

            Terrifically alone in tulips

                        the rain made of the South China Sea

            I swam toward a tiny island scrimmed with washed-up coral

 

                         and purple shells.

            I saw how many perfect ones

                        waited for me. Giddy,

 

            ashore, I pawed through them, straightened up

                        only when my hands were full. It was

            like realizing I’d put on someone else’s jacket

           

            by accident. The joy was not my own.

                        My mother was the one

            who could never leave

 

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