Delivery
The two-member Council of Double Breasted Cormorants roosting on either end of the cross bar
of a defunct clothesline in the middle of a lake will ascertain your 1) eligibility and 2) ability to
temporarily perch between them, determined by their sole and utmost discretion regarding
degrees of spatial regulations but also in conjunction with solar and atmospheric variants beyond
their control as well.
Their decision is imminent, forthcoming, coming soon and irrevocably viable. Once having
landed on above mentioned crossbar (see above) you shall be received at once and in a restrained, however celebratory fashion, swaddled in a blanket of black wings. Once dried and
shortly thereafter, you will be expeditiously dispatched to circle once again.
Why My Husband Turns Off The Ignition
I run in for birdseed
past the Goldfish
past the Gatorade
past the elbow macaroni and am stilled, instead, by
a disheveled man, standing
by a wall of flowers, shuckling
on the bent backs of broken shoes, holding
a bear claw in a clam shell
under large, glittered letters declaring
Poetry In Bloom.
He shuckles, I idle.
I idle and wonder what longing
renders us immobile?
Note: “Shuckling “is from the Yiddish word meaning “to shake” referring to the ritual swaying of worshippers during Jewish prayer.
Bardo
Violets dreamed under thirsty boughs, goldfinches dipped between thistles and
beak-deep in the anus of a dead raccoon a vulture had dinner.
A cricket longed for a lover.
Then a truck came round, struck the bird and smeared it like jam on burnt toast
to the other side, leaving the ring-tailed carcass untroubled on the right, and one
splayed wing, erect, on the left.
In its wake, between the vulture’s last hiss and the miracle
of maggot breath born from coon carrion, a man in a car
and a bug on a bone sit idling.
Once a vulture’s last supper, once road-kill, once a raccoon crossing the street,
now this.
The bug blinks. The car re-aligns, straddles the fly-blown meat; moves on.
In the rear-view mirror the business of gravid flies reconvene; carry on.
Violets awaken, finches fill up and a cricket lights a cigarette.
Liza Boyce Linder is a poet living in College Park, MD.
Image: Dr vulpes, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
