by Allen Fowler

Mice thwart their teeth with what wood holds in the walls,
answer to a boning itch, question to a witnessing ear.
Poison has been wedged at junctures of likely passage or pause,
to no avail, no avail,
no silencing stretches into sleep.

Even as directed thought ends, thinking,
even as thought concedes to not,
sleep is, hobbled by persistence, such.
tooth blunted
need rented
night

by Allen Fowler

Pierce and ugly caw embroider
an edge which parries wind
as might love, so so softly that the whole moves
as if through water.
Branch to branch, leaves bristle clack fire.

Remember your father’s breath,
how death is a dormancy,
when your mother last touched your face,
that sunrises cease to matter,
who she was you first dared.

half a bed’s half a bed
rise still jealous yellow

by Allen Fowler

Each day a question stumps us from the rich dark drama of night,
what to eat mostly, what package to wear.
Our constant doing much dispels the dearth of real choice,
until the next meal, more sleep, and the charade of dreams.

We wake to a sharper disjunction, the split-screen bird’s-eye bead of it,
two views as if one, a bi-flattening,
us cocking our heads hoping to get at the cunning of what we  think.

Pop’s cataracts sent his head tilting
to catch us in mischief clear enough to scold.
We were unrepentant in ignoring
his gruff pleas barked from the same chair
we mocked and avoided because of its stains.

wake staked up straight no
matter sun
shade

by Richard Taylor

To whom am I to give
these poems, polished,
erased, smoothed again
and fitted into murmured
line, the limb and sinew
of my affection?

To you who starts my feet
galloping to the turn, racing
the dust to words, or cools
the lathered muscle, a single rein
loose in your hand —

to you who lives on the other side
of the fence, in the backyard
where the others known as you
forever tend their ground,

whose errant strand of hair
reveals unheard of wisdom
to the timid breeze,

whose single syllable can anchor
a filament of thought, fragile
and sufficient to spin
fantasies of lace arrayed with dew,
and wait —

for whom for now I’ll simply
wrap and tie a poem
around a small stone and toss it
over the hedge into
your private garden full
of blossoms

and ask only that you
unfold it among your flowers
and throw the stone
back over the fence.