4 poems
Landscape Painting and Driving to Work
Is it better to say that I grew up near
or I am from
or to be exact to a place specifically distant from my lungs?
I say lungs because I’m trying out new images. I’m trying to be less symbolic.
When we fell in love you told me of the dead cats in the abandoned barn and I paused.
I still have only a small window into yours and where you are from. I can only imagine. I try to remember
other impossible horizons and repeat their mantras–
Always on one side of the cusp of day. Only my landscape fills my eyes.
My heart is heart-shaped in my mind. My lungs can open like a heart-shaped heart and sing. Contain a caged
song-my lungs are more like my heart.
My eyes have no scale right now for new lands and windless plains.
I don’t like to talk about what my body actually does in poems.
It is too windy for that and the snowfall this year—
It gets us all down.
When you go into that abandoned house in the woods I know to leave you to wander. I know to leave the
horizon open and my lungs protected.
I drive to work now because of the snowfall this year—
my gratitude for winter has its own problems.
This glacial pace is paced by our mouths now.
New words, in their new time.
The ash trees work with the fracking arm like our metronome
I image-search gratitude and time and fracking and heart and love and lung and ash and lung and lung–
I need to make sure what I’m seeing is what I’m seeing.
I have so much gratitude and carbon and horizons in my lungs. I gather rhythms. I leave possibilities
to other times. I stand perfectly still to see it all, to sing it all.
Miller Moths
I know I should eat healthier
that will fix this knowledge
of what I see and cannot know
in my stomach I will fix
the drought–
Another story: I am not a mother
I am not a moth and so I kill
the hoard that enters my home
at night. There is nothing poetic
about how I hit them for their light–
seeking / scatter their bodies into dust /
dark
en My House
At the HOA meeting, our fences much match
my neighbors differentiate themselves from other
neighbors. I have no words at the moment.
I feel outside my stomach and these neighbors
and their borders.
I see pictures of babies /
at the border. I hit moths. I cannot even see
a border my light, a small opening in night–
I will eat healthier I say
This will fix
The rain will fall
The rain will fall
The rain must fall
The salt I eat is my body is dust
My worries are so obvious they’re not poetry unless
this country is my body I have a drought.
I think I have a soul / I think my soul needs / my body unfortunately
Hard things take
poem shapes This
is not an essay
shattered in wind
My House rattles in the Wyoming wind
that crosses the border. The rain must fall.
There is no time for sadness
or commas no time for spring in the northern wind.
All anxious songs in the drought in the plains
We hold our heads temples shattered
Grieving the inevitable is no way to live
I tell myself add honey
I tell myself
You should live and acknowledge your body and look up more often than not
Add honey and the rain must fall.
Assume you can see without static
the stars
I forget which planet lights above in spring
I come back to harmonics, the way we live
fully delicate, this alternating time
I mourn the inevitable daily
it can all go very wrong–
a horizon a voice
Temples shatter.
Process
Pasteurization process: heating to allow some organisms and not others.
Cement process: adding water to disallow spaces, but there is air and water. We all need water;
mining clay, shells, and chalk.
My process:my collections are careful. I attribute names and document.I remember again and again.
Fear of heights: only mine is American. Mine is tender, is my mother.
Pasture: “land covered with grass and other low plants suitable for grazing animals, especially cattle or sheep.”
Tidal pools of brushed grass. We all need water.
Dandelion is also a traditional ingredient in root beer. Will we harvest them, will there be pastures of
dandelion to get our root.
My process is extraction. Allow. Fear of heights, thank you for protecting me.I mine voices and
time, I mine names, I deplete and extract.
Concretely
One day the scientists walked out into the pastures, done with the work of sending time backwards. We have
created fields of problem and time
[ ]: our worry
seeding time and weeds
sowing or harvesting
our collective song-
*
choir of gratitude for
*
*
Cement requires more pure water than we allow some humans / We value growth
Thistle grows through rock, dares you to pick it–
I can tell you the chemical makeup of concrete–it contains air.
Pierce & name this time.
These times–
So many fields. To love a thorny thing: A complicated you–
We walk through paths in the woods
I come back to what we are losing The mountains are growing and
when we write about water, we always come to rocks.
More and more voices
be still
create less / minimize
chamber foot steps
chambered wind
Wrise heavy
an overgrowth of faith
My plan is to find a stream / My plan is to write an essay
on time and green and the movement of mountains.
Joanna Doxey is the author the book of poetry, Plainspeak, WY (Platypus Press, 2016) as well as several poems appearing in CutBank Literary Journal, Denver Quarterly, Ghost Proposal, Tinderbox, and others. She currently advises undergraduate students in liberal arts at Colorado State University.