By BRUCE BOND
Let us say you are. You are the girl
who, looking out her window to the city,
takes on the grey pallor of the day,
the way some lizards take on the green
shade of the season they are in, so close
to the garden the garden cannot find them.
Now, when the thatch-roofed cottages
Send up their puffs and curls
From heating folk and pottages,
And steadily thickening swirls
By: JADYN DEWALD
“The garden is here in the middle of your bedroom,” she tells him, unbuttoning her mandarin orange blouse, then giving up and raising her arms in the manner of (he thinks) the Spaniard before Napoleon’s firing squad. He steps toward her and lifts the blouse over her head.
By JAYDN DEWALD
Afterward, he watched her lumber out of the coliseum
Swinging the severed head of his panther—
All that talk about Madrid and his old Segovia albums
And look what good it did them.
They had had it in mind to adopt a retired whippet,
which would have been easy for a retired ballet
dancer, if she had been one, and easy on the wallet
for him, an actuary. But she was a pellet-
and-woodstove saleswoman. They looked at a basset.
1.
Bobtail skin—fat and flexibly crisp—shucked
in a roll of fencing wire in the red shed: not dead
the bearer of dead skin, expanded even.
High up on fire escapes the schoolgirls clapped
erasers, chalk dust floating in a cloud,
the words and numbers scripted by the nuns
freed to autumnal treetops.
The younger junkies, for a thrill, would toss
Each other roof to rowhouse roof across
Thin alleyways of light
They scampered as if the devil
was herding them off the ledge,
each one following the others,
grass trampled black,
Bring me the birds of Rhiannon—
the ones that rouse the dead and make
the living sleep—to entertain me
that night. —The Mabinogi
Ram skulls I brought home from the fields
line the wall and survey the borage
that has spread wild up by the house,
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Celebrating 15 Years