"things that can't move learn to see" Louise Glück, The Wild Iris
Tag: nature photography
Gram
DREAMING OF GRAM It was the way her eyes rolled as she flashed her pack of cigarettes while I was explaining the impact of environmental illness, as if anyone who acknowledged the body’s needs, who didn’t do what they wanted despite physical limitations, was a whiney little roach as evidenced in her smoking while sporting an oxygen tank for advanced-stage emphysema— I’d had it with the family code of fuck-your-body- till-it-drops exemplified by our matriarch so I got in her emerald eye-shadowed face framed with brilliant orange hair and said: I don’t like you and if you want me to feel anything positive about you when you die, you need to demonstrate a shred of decency now then I stepped to the other side of the bed. Perhaps she rose from where she’d crouched between bed and wall and left, but for me, she disappeared.
Thank you to the editors of riverbabble for first publishing this poem.
Trees
Years ago, my friend dreamt she was a camp counselor leading a group of children through the forest. She woke herself when she exclaimed aloud: “Trees are our friends!”
Frank Lloyd Wright, Stanley and I agree.
Reborn
I was startled to see this cicada emerge from its “skin” on our outdoor chair at the beginning of the proliferation of cicadas that spread through the United States in 2021.
Great Legs!
Sundog
Lizards In?
ARE THERE LIZARDS IN YOUR FAMILY TREE?
Do you scuttle lithely sand and stone, peek out from rocks through half-shut lids while others' hands are clasped in dance beneath the bone-white crescent slit? Are your eyes autonomous, right darts to lips and left to toes; as softer flesh sips steamed orgeat do you watch the spoon, the ankles cross? Do you begin each day with push-ups then shield yourself from sun in shade; when threatened do your muscles flex, your speech reduce to a chortling hiss? Do others comment, How cold your hands, how dry your skin? Do you dream of grasshoppers sweet in your mouth, or screaming wake from the jaws of a snake?
Thank you to the editor of Something Like Homesickness: A Zapizdat Poetry Anthology for first publishing this poem.
Future
The future enters us in order to transform us long before it happens.
Dawn’s Palm
Masks
MASKS OF CARDINAL FEATHERS
Drape
Me in
Crimson rOse petals,
garnets,
coraL,
RuBies
and feed me
dragon's Blood,
cherries,
straWberries,
plums,
salmon,
meRlot
then make me
glow,
flush,
blush,
BlooM
till I'm
Rubeous,
carneLian,
verMilioN
as ScarLet hummingbirds
SOAR from our
Mad
voRacious
heartS.
Thank you to the editor of Absinthe Revival for first publishing this poem.
Elizabeth Oakley Weaver 