by Donna J. Long

A window by day hides
what’s inside, like a mirror
reveals only an exterior.
Architecture teaches me to
be able to look within
depends on the light cast.
If late at night I see
a stranger undressing,
I may find myself
arrested.  Small break,
aversion rendered
thin as this glass pane
between me and the world.

by Donna J. Long

The Departure
Tulum, Mexico

The market square is shuttered, empty
but for the dogs standing around, barely

glancing at us as we leave to catch
a six a.m. bus at the crossroads.  In Tulum

the dogs are quiet — they don’t waste
their energy to bark.  One dog stretches

across the walk, another mongrel worn
by starvation, worms, disease.  Lisa coos,

thinking it asleep, but I remember this
stillness after my mother’s last breath.

It isn’t seeing the lungs rise and fall, eyes
open and close, but the subtle vibration

of cells life requires.  And then it stops.
The dog was dead.  We caught our bus.

by Donna J. Long

So you were born
short, stout, wingless,
someone for whom fight
or flight was canceled
by a genetic cog
whose wheel was yet
to be invented.  Looking
for your likeness you
learned to pray, to praise,
even to name promised
too little.  In one fit
of survivor’s guilt you
spent hours grazing
shelves, resolved to
revise your own field
guide, to lay blame
when the kildeer’s cry
failed to thin the herd.  You began
to take in strays for a night’s
pleasure to spite the ache
of your self-centering.  You,
who longed to live in a gentle
wood but lacked bamboo’s
energy, desired an unruly
garden but managed in-
stead to invent the fence.

by normal

the telephone book of history opened &
closed &

SLAMMED
SLAMMED
SLAMMED

you were one up
in a world of diminishing returns
& life steamed from the sweat
on your skin.

i took my shift on the
hospital ward that night,
where the sounds of the dying
battled for front stage center
with the shrill sounds of the
17 year cicadas

& for 24 hrs black
ceased to be the color
of mourning &

death
was such a little man
with so much work
left to do.