May 1-7, 2017: Poetry from Alex Ewing and Jan Wiezorek

Just Go Please

Last night was especially brutal
Your hands were so close, yet never crossed the threshold of my neck
I can still feel the heat of your fingertips 
Pointing to the door

October Wood

Some niche: rested in planks
with its own electric fingers

hovering light to become
our hands, caressing a

mahogany thigh and
making death through

elemental cuts and saws.
Here in the mist jays strain

among wooden feeders and
lichen stains like palms

wrestling with backbone and
clavicle. We are so strong

until the cardinal shares seeds
with mate. Then, we have the

tendency to take out a folded
linen cloth and share it, wrapping

each femur of petrified wood
while bird tolls a dee, dee, dee.

Is it true we bury some religious
without a lid, the death face

covered in tossed flowers, not
wood? And we hold them well

into night, feeling muscles, skeleton,
and hair against our knees, rocking

death away with sensational fingers
and cushions of body bark.

Library Reading Room

Living dust is always learning,
tucked along bookshelves, lining
in graphite fill, filmed across
flamboyant ice blocks of glass.

It cushions the amperes of green-
focused lamps, is sewn in gold-
filigree frames, taunts the colors
themselves, inviting the eye to image

what is paint—and what is disguised
brushwork of somber dust-catchers.
Sitting, turning, trading eyeballs,
clicking surfaces, they fail to alpha-

betize correctly when the librarian asks
again and again. He brushes them off.
And so we come to this—pour out the
vacuum; empty it before the second seating.

Township Cemetery

Pasqual, the name weathered on a time-rune
stone, conducted the underground railway

in the twenty years leading up to the Civil War.
At great cost and with hardship to family, the

memorial shouts, and we hear echoes, trimmed in
angelic tondi for liberty, bamboo crosses, and

three flowers: red, white, and blue. Honor, for
sure, in the hillside of ill-repair; no visitors.

The gate squeaks its neon “open” as much as
a formal parting. Hunt for such history

among the first-named free, back to black
holler, and find a footstone in foundation

rocks and tumbled hearths: their past
lives on in loveless troubles, carpet moss.