Change in the Weather
by Cynthia Knorr
The storm was different last night
pumped up and reckless
a drunk teenager behind the wheel of the car, speeding.
The rain and wind joined forces
searching for a way inside our house—
one infiltrating the sodden roof
the other throwing punches at the windows.
We lay beside each other in the dark
waiting for the crash that would ruin tomorrow.
The earth used to set limits on the weather
but now she is whispering go for it.
They deserve it.
Some of us deserve it more than others:
climate-change deniers, oligarchs, oil barons, yes,
but Puerto Ricans, Inuits, Sub-Saharan Africans?
Closer to home: you and me, dear?
We recycle our bags, eat farm to table, rarely take an airplane.
I hear the earth laughing.
The Poet Needs a Puppy
by Cynthia Knorr
Abusers, destroyers, adulterers, addicts,
no one is up to anything good in her poems.
The poet needs a puppy to take her mind away
from hydrogen bombs, poisonous spiders,
black rhinos rising from an African pond
to crush a tourist camp, leaving nothing behind
but a broken chair and a leg bone.
What kind of tortured place is the mind
that spews forth this chaos?
If there was a puppy, it might climb onto the keyboard
and direct the poet’s fingers to sunnier places—
a picnic in the meadow, not the basement
where an innocent child is beaten, not the living room
where mother sits on the floor and drinks whiskey
because father gambled away the living room furniture.
Maybe the poet is trapped in a failing marriage,
agoraphobic, friendless. Or was it something
that happened in the way back, the place
where memory cells keep their fodder wrapped
and resistant to retrieval but still able, like a wizard
behind a curtain, to cause mayhem in the here and now.
Whatever. The poet will write what the poet will write.
I don’t have to read it. Besides which,
she already has a puppy that sits beside her as we speak,
licks her on the lips, and eats a biscuit.
it became difficult to tell
by Vincent Hisock
it became difficult to tell
i: kitchen light
Yearling
pine with a spring lean from late winter’s freezing
rain. The pines bend in their
remembering, but still stand straight enough
in this new breeze
tossing them. A misled
guess draws
pale wings set
in flight swept up
upon air
to the bright-lit window behind a man watering his
lawn at night—these
multiplied, suburban
moons.
usurpation
by Vincent Hisock
usurpation
after hd
Rite of onrush
upon the lapse of sand, moon-pull
the sun made glass, green
waver over red-brown
—a band of jasper
vapors to punctuating hush
& shine. Thunder cracks,
rim-shot at some joke Poseidon
conjured. The sink & rise of
horizon in s-curve
from vision’s end to run transparent-smooth
upon my feet, unending
penultimate pulled up while the
sea slips
into place.