4 poems
Wild, Honey
(a spell)
Erratic tongues of light
wishing matches
“peace with all our heart”
(say outdoors)
outpours
candle dark boing boing flicker
till sunrise
quickens like pocket matches
reckon pouring light
(battered doors)
cut stone like fury water—
A wick this far
say this spell
the light of running into things
(O poor of heart)
Forest cats are wild, honey—
Spirit burn
like wedding matches
(mossy floor, mossy floor)
Gathering Turquoise Stones
the shaman is
empty-handed
in a field
His face reasons
summer cumulus
A year ago tomorrow
I read to you your poems
until reason
was unable to continue
Re-tracing the ellipse
I toss dead sunflowers
Reason is
a swallowtail
All is concealed
the blue stones
sing
New Year (a pinhole photograph)
peels the bowl of anemones : salamander same size as
“salamander” : when the biologist let the ant cut his finger
a red drop drops : a man gives you an apple :
occurrence a jar hundreds of fireflies can’t put back :
three days ago during his bypass D watched himself flurry :
a jaguar deity : snow is not falling : snow is falling
The Silence
Not to say darkling beetle
yellowing juniper cryptogamic soil
(check your plants, a sign at the nursery says
a frog lives here)
is not to say badland came before
crescendo when that cliff face sheared
(what paper hears, paper forgives)
is not to say gliding
on reaching the dancefloor breathe
for a sec is not to say
choreographer skips like a high horse
listen (she canters)
is not to say the self who doesn’t
suffer (stay with me) also leaves
footprints is not to say
the frog isn’t here (did you check—)
Mary Cisper’s poems and reviews have appeared in Lana Turner, Newfound, PoetryNow, Denver Quarterly, OmniVerse, and elsewhere. Her collection, Dark Tussock Moth, won the 2016 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press (2017). She lives in northern New Mexico.