Grounded in a place you can’t see, you will not be allowed off the gondola
mid-mountain for fog you’ll float on five ah sounds (or another vowel) and
on on top floatfloat beyond the pole rope/ turn the gondola will pause
Category: Issue 15 | 2019
ICE/box
This is just to say
you have stolen
these children
whom you are
refrigerating
and whom
you are using
as leverage
for funding your wall
How to Walk Like a Quadruped
Post horse-kick
to the knee, post-election, I still take to the trail on foot.
An hour a day in the woods,
two miles tops, is as far as my bad leg goes.
After a while,
the good leg goes, too, from carrying the extra load.
When you inject
trauma into a system, more trauma spins off, ripples out.
Another problem
The Deaf Woman and Silence
The deaf woman is oak beech maple fir catalpa pine willow larch.
She is bark leaf twig root cambium.
Do not worry that the deaf woman will be felled planed sawn into
planks.
Excerpt from The Book of Lamentations
All the crows in town flying over our house, their moxy
collective and loyal; common or not, I’m drawn to this bird
who knows faces and will fight for an unrelated crow.
But now my childhood friend defends two men for stopping
traffic for four and a half minutes—each minute a minute
for an hour Michael Brown’s body bled in the street. The Judge
claims the defendant cannot wear his shirt bulletproof:
black lives matter as it is unfair to the commonwealth,
imagine this before a jury he says—this, after ten months of court.
[Incandescence]
Not just a spiral but a spiraled spiral.
Not just light but heat. The Edison bulb,
endangered for good reason and yet it’s our nature
to return to what’s familiar but bad for us.
Fuck the cold light of the LED, the green
fluorescent. You know you’d be the bat
[The Timber Wolf]
In this version, she’s still not easy to love. In this version,
she stalks your pets, not your children. Her indifference
cuts you. Her unflinching yellow eyes. She’s no
shoeshine deer, no lapsed sheep. In this version, she ignores
Little Red Riding Hood, her talcumed grandmother.
Dura Mater
I carried death inside me for several days, waiting
That man had no ticket to the concert; he pressed his ear to the wall,
but no song found him
Bees were swarming; they made sleeves and a hood around me when I stood still
All winter a deep booming as black ice shifted on the lake, cracking into continents
Prayer with Torn Edges & Animals
Listen, I need one that begins with what zoologists call a
crèche
of lions, how the soft gold wings of the pride sweep to enfold those left
behind; how she nurses each
foundling as her own. See,
everywhere boys
are running from something.
What do we know? Tell me
again
Issue 15 | 2019 : Coming Soon
The best poems from our 2019 Floating Bridge Chapbook Competition are nearly ready for publication. Stay tuned for Issue 15 coming in the next few weeks! In the meantime, go submit your full-length poetry manuscript to our Evergreen Award Tour! Pre-order Wilderness//Kingdom by Jory Mickelson, Winner of the Evergreen Award Tour 2019.
