Tagged: ars Poetry

Herding Thoughts of Children

how many things do we do
to cover up the last thing we did?

this poem, the next poem
all poems. poems carry joy

as far as a newborn elk
carries her father’s antlers

i want to be a bison clearing snow
i want to be a bison clearing

abandoned cars off the interstate
i want to lead with my face

and leave trails made by it
sometimes it feels like my face

is way out in front of me. like
there are pictures of me everywhere

a nightmare i’m sure I had
when i was younger, before

the world changed. there i am again
blowing smoke out of my nose

always the one eye
out the side of my head. there are

times when i have seen myself
and looked significantly older

times when others have seen me
and said i haven’t changed

what will i do with a kid? i hope
she is the fastest in her class. so

she can go. she must go far enough
that things regrow

before turning back. in a meadow
the herding animals gather

we begin the slick exchange
of doing over, genetics

passed like promises
under a table. four good legs, heart

history, blood history, the history
of grass regrowing, not regrowing

if we have a kid, will it really be
unable to stand? will it be

unable to run immediately
if it needed to?

The Understood [You]

I hope my poems
are written on post-its
and placed into
bicycle helmets

That when we die
it’s a moving truck
that takes us
hitting meticulously placed trees
at equidistant seconds
that time itself
can recycle its breathing
a person’s time
is often kept
in very small spaces
this is why i ask

Will there be
a silence without cicadas?
without the A/C going?
without the long
shuffleboard slide
of another plane going?
and this…
what is this…
the thinking?

I want it true
that cactus hairs
are really
the sides of whales
that really
we are something
when we’ve died

Big Fish, Small Pond

in the small town of her aunt
there is one cobbler of shoes
for the animals, one doctor
one aquarium gravel vendor
one poet

in the small pond of her aunt
there are many great fish, whose
tails can be felt stirring up
the water from anywhere

in the big city she can see less
far, her lips stay parted to the sky
she waits for the clouds
to saturate and sink into her mouth
like flakes of food

First Contact

Again I failed to intoxicate my feet
or disprove my neurosis, but i did
manage to warm my body under
a faucet in one of the keg suites, we
both did actually, and talked about
how neither of us had dressed for this

and then for the rest of the night
i felt like i was leaving something
in the rooms i left, my gloves, though
i didn’t come here with any, my
other hands that would skitter off
if i left them unchained to my wrists

what’s more, i hate these pretty places
where i am one of three poets, where
the other two are out on the roof painting
signal lights on their faces. they are
arresting purples, their words are sharp
like the color of insects and i must have met every person

here: my name is britt, we met in the water
before and i forgot to take you with me. i am not
the type to hang from ledges. i will instead kick rocks
with you from far away, write down every word
of the oldest things as they fall