National Poetry Month Day 30

Freak
Susan Grimm

Grin. Pinch. At arm’s length. But then the tense line
melts, the willingness to leap, the creamy fall

into love, an engine that once begun purrs
perpetual adoration, the hearthfire that never

goes out—a boy in short pants or frontier girl
having carried the coal from one home to another.

It’s never over for a dog. The red glass breaks. Cold
sharpened votive tongues. Standing before the guttering

candles, wicked jokes that cannot be blown out.

*
A Theory of Bowers
Jesse McGuinness

: dwelling
sense of leafy arbor and tricky
needlework by mothlight.

Of cups of moss, of bud-blooded
sense of made and a stylus for the wing

work of ruby kinglets in low canopy.
And ever needles and fleecy spider throws

for a large clutch. Bark strips.
What has been left. What is leftover.

Sense of hollow place banded by twiggings:
The king ruds when riled. Of gems of eggs,

a dynasty of hovers over rootlegs
of white spruce and black, fir and stitch,

and the high canopy habits of still wires.
Of the paper airplane and its nest of sawdust
undreaming of its branches.

*
Untitled
Jonathan Sadowsky

In the city I have
the perfect camouflage.
Like the pigeons
I dress in gray.

I sit on the fire escape.
Even the pigeons are fooled.
Every few minutes
I make a flapping noise.

On the street
when someone walks towards me
I walk away.