Read More: A brief interview with Sarah McCann
Reform And The Rest
Well, the wind still touches me.
A leaf tumbles to stop on my foot.
There are bowls of glass in the desert
marking where a tree of lightning stood.
Squirrels, and not by mistake in fear,
arc toward me now. And birds are the flourish
for my hair. There is enough evidence of fusion
for me in a pearl of water down a pane.
I am only capable of inhalation.
What I see camps in my eye.
Roots don’t give up seeking
when even their far-off leaves have dried.
It takes a while though.
I don’t intend to go to war for this.
I accept. Large immortality
around me. I have a fig in hand.
I accept I’m taken over.
Magnetic fields are shifting
after years of napping fallow,
wrested by a planet drifting too close.
Death Portrait
A man hugging his accordion in the suburbs.
Outside. Same song. His teeth collect stains.
He becomes an old boat for the tune.
His nose a rotting penumbra, a battlestain, airless […]
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The Works
We harvest the salt
off the rocks where the sun
left scars.
The rats have eaten all the peahen’s eggs.
Not one turkey egg hatched.
The pig is a bachelor.
The sheep find it safer near the village.
Rabbits in holes too
many to count. Their shadows
become more rabbits.
Thirteen of the olive trees over fifty years thick.
We put out the fires when we can. […]
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This Turnip
The puzzle began with the spade.
The crimp-toes a goat’s.
A crucific bulb kicking, feet first,
the dead boy in the ditch.
Crows plucked his calves to meat
and ducklings snapped about his pearly knees. […]
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Sarah McCann has been a Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has worked around the world. She has been published and has work forthcoming in such journals as The Bennington Review, Margie, The Broken Bridge Review, Midway Journal, The South Dakota Review and Hanging Loose. Her poetry has also appeared in Thom Tammaro’s anthology, Visiting Frost: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of Robert Frost and an anthology from the Academy of American Poets, New Voices. Her translations from the Modern Greek into English have been recognized by the Fulbright Foundation with a grant and published in such anthologies and journals as Austerity Measures, Words Without Borders, Poetry International, and World Literature Today. She has also had the pleasure to edit a collection of poetry from the late American poet Robert Lax, Tertium Quid, and a book of her translations of the Greek poet Maria Laina is forthcoming from World Poetry Books through the University of Connecticut.
Read More: A brief interview with Sarah McCann