wetland

land areas that are covered often intermittently with shallow water or have soil saturated with moisture.

 

 

 

As a poet boy, the place I called

my scriptorium was a little box

made of straggly pine and writing

and a scrunch of tiny figurines,

their booties so tight and plastic

not even the sun, tossed in amoung

them, could disfigure their bravery

and skill. I covered this box with the

cellophane from a larger roll used

to wrap my sandwiches for school

when we had peanut-butter. I was

a man in the navy when I discovered

that sandwiches could be made of

just about anything. My fast friend

from Illinois told me of mayonnaise

sandwiches and cornish hens. What

are cornish hens anyway but miniature

fanatacals who scurry around and wait

for their doom in that fairytale where

the giant wanders through an indefensible

town stomping everything in his path

like the cancer that so consumed Dad his

voice changed with those scrofula

on his neck like old world trees with

slender, swordlike leaves for eyes and

would scare my sister so she tightened

her hand around the back of my pants

and moved me first into his room like

that little girl again who had to be saved

from drowing in three inch water and

then writing her name in the wettest

sand, in the largest font that a shore

could contain, by the

tinniest arm.

Reviews

[Circe]

this is incredible.... i still don't know what to say but that each time i read it i feel tears form... it's just so vivid... and the cornish hens as miniature fanatacals who scurry and wait for their doom.... is it empathy for the hen i feel or just the pure observation extended to everything, like a reverence for everything...

[Tree]

Beautiful, sad. The way you navigate your words down the overgrown and hidden trails of memory, astonishes here. But I've seen that in all your work. And your little sister, and the sand, and the font. Her "tinniest arm''..... A moving piece, dana